[Flipside]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29158666

Nooooooooooooo!!!!!

Still only a rumour, but I hope it's not true, not because I believe that everything Microsoft touches turns to ****e, but because their business model is utterly incompatible with the way Minecraft is approached by its players.

[CommanderDJ]

[Hades]

not that minecraft was ever actually good

e: to further elaborate, Notch was a hilariously incompotent developer and although the current lead is better, it's still not in a state where I can say that it, without mods, is good. That's not to say that Microsoft buying Mojang will make things better or can't make it worse.

[Flipside]

Well, at least you clarified yourself.

The thing here is, like all games, it's down to a matter of personal preference. I play Minecraft heavily modded (using the Hatpack on Feed The Beast) and it does greatly improve the game, this is true.

I'm pretty sure that, unless Mojang get concessions, one of the first things Microsoft would do away with is Mod compatibility. They'd much rather release their own Mods as DLC as currently happens on the XBox. I have a suspicion one of the first things they would add to the game is a link to a marketplace to buy texture packs etc.

[Akalabeth Angel]

Not sure that selling 50 Million copies == hilariously incompetent.


I personally have sunk some 300+ hours into vanilla minecraft.
Almost never played mods because the few times I did they invariably made the program very unstable.

[Luis Dias]

Yeah, clearly they did something very very right. And now Notch is being bought by the exact sum he previously said (two years ago) he would agree to. Everyone thought he was just kidding, or just making a very high number up in the vein of "I'll never be bought". Perhaps he was just being really honest in setting the price he was honestly expecting to sell Mojang.

[Akalabeth Angel]

Maybe he'll fund Psychonauts 2 now

[CloudZ1116]

Come on now, it can't be all bad that Mojang is getting M$'s big bucks behind it. Disclaimer: I am a Microsoft employee. That being said, I work for a division that was originally a startup that was bought out two years ago. Far as I can tell, things haven't changed much; most of the original employees are still here, the original founder/CEO is now the division GM, and they still do things like they did back in the day (for better AND for worse). Perhaps Mojang will get similar treatment; business as usual, just with a lot more $$$ to play around with.

[Phantom Hoover]

Well, at least you clarified yourself.

The thing here is, like all games, it's down to a matter of personal preference. I play Minecraft heavily modded (using the Hatpack on Feed The Beast) and it does greatly improve the game, this is true.

I'm pretty sure that, unless Mojang get concessions, one of the first things Microsoft would do away with is Mod compatibility. They'd much rather release their own Mods as DLC as currently happens on the XBox. I have a suspicion one of the first things they would add to the game is a link to a marketplace to buy texture packs etc.

Mojang have never been gracious towards the mod community. Need I remind you that Minecraft continues to this day to be distributed as an obfuscated .jar, which is actively antagonistic towards modding, and that despite promising a proper modding interface for three years Mojang have shown no inclination whatsoever towards delivering it; mods today are still built on the same foundation of unstable, brute-force hacks as they were at the beginning. I can also point to Bukkit, which has recently imploded thanks to Mojang's 'have modders fix our ****ty game for free' policy taking its toll.

I can't really see how Microsoft could be worse.

Yeah, clearly they did something very very right.

Lots and lots and lots of entertainment products have sold like hotcakes despite being of extremely poor artistic merit. Unless you're about to step forward and declare your love for Two and a Half Men, Transformers and the collected works of Seltzer and Friedberg I'd appreciate if you dropped this asinine line of reasoning.

[Scotty]

I, for one, would appreciate keeping this civil.  There's literally no reason to be abrasive over opinions on Minecraft's quality as media.

[Klaustrophobia]

i actually DO like the transformers movies.   

[Lorric]

i actually DO like the transformers movies.   

I watched the first one and enjoyed it.

I know a family who Two and a Half Men, at least a few years ago anyway, was their favourite show which they would all watch together as a family. They would all be doing their separate thing, but when I was there and that show came on, everything stopped and they would all emerge from wherever they were to sit down and watch it together, and I think it was really good that they all did that as a family.

If someone else has a problem with that, that's their problem, not mine, yours, or that family's.

Entertainment is subjective.

[Flipside]

I, for one, would appreciate keeping this civil.  There's literally no reason to be abrasive over opinions on Minecraft's quality as media.

This. I also would prefer it if people stopped trying to drag every single thread into an argument.

[Akalabeth Angel]

Yeah, clearly they did something very very right.

Lots and lots and lots of entertainment products have sold like hotcakes despite being of extremely poor artistic merit. Unless you're about to step forward and declare your love for Two and a Half Men, Transformers and the collected works of Seltzer and Friedberg I'd appreciate if you dropped this asinine line of reasoning.

The success of questionable products doesn't preclude that the similar success of other products like Minecraft is merited.
For one comparing something like Minecraft to something like Transformers is not analogous as Transformers has a huge amount of marketing and production money behind it whereas Minecraft was a game which was initially spread by word of mouth. Regular gamers told other gamers or made videos which showed the game was good and its success is largely born from that. Not only did that spur the success of the game but it launched the youtube careers of a variety of people like Yogscast who now, spend their days doing the job of playing and producing minecraft videos.

Minecraft is a great game.
Great on its own and greater in its flexibility of play through mods or custom servers.

So great a game that it has spurred a mass of imitators and the seeming necessity of many games to now include "crafting systems". Which is not to say that Minecraft created crafting, but it certainly seemed a turning point in how saturated games became with these sorts of systems.

[deathfun]

I, for one, would appreciate keeping this civil.  There's literally no reason to be abrasive over opinions on Minecraft's quality as media.

This. I also would prefer it if people stopped trying to drag every single thread into an argument.

No

I doubt Microsoft buying Minecraft/Mojang is going to change much. It's profitable as it is and I doubt MS wants to muck around with that

[Flipside]

No

I doubt Microsoft buying Minecraft/Mojang is going to change much. It's profitable as it is and I doubt MS wants to muck around with that

I would post 'Yes', but that didn't go so well last time it happened

There's an intersting article on it on IGN

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2014/09/10/how-microsoft-buying-mojang-could-change-minecraft-forever

[Phantom Hoover]

(e: This was in reply to Akalabeth.)

OK, let me summarise My Personal Views On Minecraft for the nth time:

There's a nucleus of stuff in Minecraft which is absolute gold, somewhere in the intersection of the construction and resource gathering and exploration mechanics which were laid down in infdev and alpha. My memories of late alpha and early beta multiplayer are rich with heady nostalgia. However, the actual piece of software called 'Minecraft' which contained that experience was incredibly incomplete, riddled with bugs and broken systems. Anyone who played back in those days surely remembers the frustration of waking up one day to discover that a routine patch had totally buggered the game. You couldn't really call it 'great', but it was dripping with promise.

But it didn't deliver. Mojang patched up the bugs, eventually, but as far as that core brilliance goes there wasn't much improvement or refinement at all, just some fairly inconsequential novelties. When Notch finally did try to really push the game's basic vision, the result was the Adventure Update, which mostly served to cloud the things that made Minecraft great with ill-fitting RPG fluff.

Notch caught lightning in a bottle, basically, and while that might deserve praise it was down to luck as much as his own skill. The real test of his abilities was whether he'd have the perceptiveness and creativity to take that idea to new and greater heights, and in that respect he, and his successors at Mojang, have failed dismally.

[rev_posix]

One thing that I have not seen mentioned yet is what happens to those who have made a living from making videos and monetizing them via youtube or streaming on twitch/hitbox?

One of the major things that mojang always allowed was the ability to record gameplay and monetize it.  Microsoft, last I looked at their EULA, specifically forbids people from making money at all from the software they publish/own.

If Microsoft does buy Mojang and applies these rules to minecraft, the impact of LPers and server owners is going to be huge.

[Akalabeth Angel]

Notch caught lightning in a bottle, basically, and while that might deserve praise it was down to luck as much as his own skill. The real test of his abilities was whether he'd have the perceptiveness and creativity to take that idea to new and greater heights, and in that respect he, and his successors at Mojang, have failed dismally.

What heights would these be?
I've heard people talk about the potential but no one's really put it into words.

[TwentyPercentCooler]

Someone on one of the many reddit posts about this made a good point: Minecraft, to people that are in the demographics of HLP, is just a game that some enjoy and some don't. But for the young preteen or early teen crowd, it's practically a religion. Microsoft is essentially trying to buy a generation. They really should look at the success rate of a bunch of old white guys trying to get in on what's "hip" before they waste the $2.5 billion,  though.