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It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

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Re: It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

#31

Post by tomrod »

karaterobot wrote: post #16
amiga wrote: post #8

Anyone who has ever seen an MS acquisition play out before knew this was coming. Minecraft has been open for some time, and that has an effect counter to the control that MS seeks over its products. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" has been the strategy for decades.

This doesn't make sense. They bought Minecraft 8 years ago, and it's grown by an order of magnitude since then. It's a huge cash cow for them. In what way is that consistent with the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy from 26 years ago, when they had an entirely different leadership team and business model? How is this not just a dumb move on their part, and actually part of some master plan to ... what... lose m…

How many more licenses will be purchased -- and how much can they make from the lifetime value of Realms subscribers?

Seems like the beancounters won this one.

Re: It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

#32

Post by jacknews »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #23
yodon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously arguing that Microsoft is intentionally trying to "extinguish" it's own IP? I realize that "Embrace, extend, extinguish" is a hopelessly tired and outdated meme, but trying to freshen it up by arguing they've now reached a level where they are intentionally trying to kill their OWN products as part of some grand and 30-year-in-the-past EEE "plan" is simply absurd.

I don't follow Minecraft or this issue closely, this is pure speculation, but MS could be trying to extinguish self hosted servers and would prefer all players playing on official Mincraft servers.

Yes, self-hosted servers, hypixel, etc, and java edition are clearly the target.

It was bad enough having to pay twice for the same game (java edition, then bedrock edition, as some of their friends could only play the microsoft edition on their Nintendo Switches, etc).

But if microsoft cause the 3rd party ecosystem of servers and mods to close down forcing everyone onto microsoft servers, I will ban my kids from playing at all. Quite sad, they and their friends have grown up with minecraft, it's almost the lego of our times, with a dose of capture-the-flag, though my kids also have lego and play skirmish irl.

Re: It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

#33

Post by OrangeMonkey »

api wrote: post #28
OrangeMonkey wrote: post #26

Quoted post unavailable.

Kiwi Farms went into the realm of swatting people and trying to get people to kill themselves (with one or two successes). Of course that being said I fail to understand why more normal remedies couldn’t apply there. Swatting is a felony and hounding someone to suicide is at least very civilly actionable. Why did Cloudflare need to be the police here when regular police or the “Sandy Hook solution” seemed warranted?

Re speech - The government typically does not fare well when they try to restrict a persons speech.

Re Swatting - because there was no proof. The forums actually had a pretty hard policy about anything that appeared to be swatting related and banned users immediately for it. With the forums taking a hard stance against swatting, with proof, why would they have been found liable.

So because nothing was provable or illegal, the internet begged a corporation to remove its fire protection service. Once it was done, to the surprise of literally noone, someone burned it down.

I have trouble reconciling when the community supports corporations policing speech and also complains about it. In my opinion, its based on whether the people like the speech or not. It makes me concerned that the concept of free speech, at least that which I grew up with on the early internet, is no more.

Re: It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

#34

Post by djbusby »

amiga wrote: post #8

Anyone who has ever seen an MS acquisition play out before knew this was coming. Minecraft has been open for some time, and that has an effect counter to the control that MS seeks over its products. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" has been the strategy for decades.

Embrace, Extract (wealth), Extinguish?

Re: It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

#35

Post by OrangeMonkey »

jstarfish wrote: post #11
8jy89hui wrote: post #2

Does anyone have any insight into why Microsoft thought this was necessary? Minecraft has been server-moderated for years now and has been wildly successful. I've never heard of any hate groups or even hateful servers (I'm sure they exist, but they don't make the news in a way that would harm Microsoft). Is there some legislation that would make it a liability for Microsoft to not moderate all the chat? This move jus…

I don't know The Reason (probably child exploitation), but it's telling that within the first few comments people are discussing how to abuse the system to get Minecraft YouTubers deplatformed. The haters are in plain sight.

The culture of our timeline is based around disliking someone online and bringing real world consequences to them. Whether that is by getting them fired or getting them banned from services its the flavor du jour.

To quote the big short - "They arn't confessing, they are bragging."

Re: It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

#36

Post by pythonlover2153 »

yodon wrote: post #18
amiga wrote: post #8

Anyone who has ever seen an MS acquisition play out before knew this was coming. Minecraft has been open for some time, and that has an effect counter to the control that MS seeks over its products. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" has been the strategy for decades.

Are you seriously arguing that Microsoft is intentionally trying to "extinguish" it's own IP? I realize that "Embrace, extend, extinguish" is a hopelessly tired and outdated meme, but trying to freshen it up by arguing they've now reached a level where they are intentionally trying to kill their OWN products as part of some grand and 30-year-in-the-past EEE "plan" is simply absurd.

They may be trying to phase out the Java Edition of the game and convince players to switch to the Bedrock Edition

Re: It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

#37

Post by lolinder »

Georgelemental wrote: post #17
ninth_ant wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may underestimate how truly horrific some of the online communications are in any non-trivial service. Especially when kids are involved. Having been exposed to some of the stuff going on at other companies communication systems, I have total sympathy for mojang wanting some people off of all their platforms, forever. Most any system is built like this from the ground up, it’s rather surprising it took them this…

Is it "their" platform if the server is hosted by people who are not them on hardware that is not theirs? They are just selling a license to use their executables, no? Or should be (I don't play Minecraft)

In the event of abuse, parents won't draw that distinction and neither would a Twitter mob. Microsoft needs to be able to point to something concrete they're doing to keep kids safe or they're risking a scandal.

Re: It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

#38

Post by aliqot »

openfuture wrote: post #21
amiga-workbench wrote: post #6

I think now is the time for people to be putting their energies into something like Minetest[1] so they can't have the rug pulled on them. There are already some mods available, but it would be great to see more ported. [1] https://www.minetest.net/

No. Not yet. First we must(!) address the incentive problem in free software (and society) then things like minetest will outcompete things like minecraft naturally. The only reason it doesn't already is because developers can only get paid working on less valuable (read: closed) software. See: https://datalisp.is .

Hi Bill!

In all seriousness though, this isn't likely to happen, so let's not let perfect be the enemy of good.

Re: It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

#40

Post by TakeBlaster16 »

lolinder wrote: post #22
8jy89hui wrote: post #2

Does anyone have any insight into why Microsoft thought this was necessary? Minecraft has been server-moderated for years now and has been wildly successful. I've never heard of any hate groups or even hateful servers (I'm sure they exist, but they don't make the news in a way that would harm Microsoft). Is there some legislation that would make it a liability for Microsoft to not moderate all the chat? This move jus…

Roblox has been mired in controversy for years for failing to keep their platform safe enough for the kids they target. I'm not familiar enough to comment on the details of that controversy, but I would be surprised if that didn't feature prominently in Microsoft's decision here.

What if they ran official Microsoft servers with moderated chat, but also let you join custom servers after showing a scary warning message (and maybe checked your account birthday or something too). Would that not be enough to free them of liability?
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