Does Minecraft go down for several days like Roblox does?
Does Minecraft ban/cancel people like PewDiePie as Roblox did?
Aren't monthly active users (MAU) around 100M for each?
I think Roblox is eventually doomed to slowly fizzle like Second Life, etc. Internet history is littered with the corpses of dead closed systems. Remember Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL? Remember Myspace?
Microsoft might eventually, say, install mandatory AI inside Minecraft that forces all players to behaviorally conform to the social and political views of the most vocal group of Microsoft employees. Then some other immersive 3D world builder with more open rules of participation will send Minecraft to its grave.
Mojang would have a problem trying to control Minecraft because it's written in Java, their developers commonly associate with the players who hack the game, and the only control over the gameservers that they have is their authentication servers- which you can disable the use of by editing one flag in your server config files, allowing anyone to play even if they didn't buy the game.
This describes the current state of Minecraft, but Microsoft can tie new releases to new restrictions. The unknowing masses will adopt the new version without understanding the loss of freedom. Look at the success MS, Adobe, etc., have had getting people to pay rent each month for software like Office and Photoshop that they used to buy once and run forever.
Modded players already are decoupled from the current version.
For a while everything interesting was stuck on 1.7 so while Microsoft may have shipped 1.8, and 1.9 nobody of consequence played those in the modded scene.
Even today, the newer Minecraft versions are only used for very experimental packs. Something mainstream is on 1.12 while Microsoft have already begun shipping 1.19
Because of this, you have for many years been able to pick which version of Minecraft is started, new versions don't overwrite old ones.
This freedom to use old versions sounds good. But of Minecraft's 100M+ users, what percentage know this? What percentage just automatically update to the newest version and don't explore the mod scene?
I just read that Mojang added no opt-out telemetry to version 21w38a.[1]
How many Minecrafters are savvy enough to understand that this happened, and the long-term implications?
I initially tried to follow guides and "mods" to disable Win 10 telemetry but eventually gave up because MS changes how telemetry is disabled with every single update.
I mean, I don't know what fraction of that 100M users are Java Minecraft. Obviously Bedrock is entirely up to Microsoft, they can do whatever they want in their sandbox and I'm sure most 5 year olds don't care either way.
On Java Minecraft, which is the only way you can seriously modify the game - I haven't actually run the out-of-box experience for many years, but unless it changed you just pick the version you want from a GUI.
If you play modded more than a tiny "dip my toe in it" amount you run dedicated "launcher" software (I run MultiMC) and that takes responsibility for managing a whole bunch of exciting problems, each of your Mod packs probably expects to live in a separate Minecraft environment, with a specific version of the game, it needs to track whether the Java parameters are special (e.g. more heap, different garbage collection prefs) some people prefer to play some packs in a different screen resolution.
One of the very strange things for a few years was that Twitch (yes, that one) managed this stuff for a lot of players. You've got the Twitch.tv app, which people use to watch say, Ninja playing Fortnite, and there's a tab in there for mods, and then a tab inside that for Minecraft, and that's a valid modded Minecraft launcher. It made some sort of sense because one of the few long term audiences on Twitch is Minecraft, so while there may never be more Minecraft audiences than there are people watching this week's hot new game, by next year that game is irrelevant and the same audience is still watching Minecraft. The tie-in deal that caused this eventually went away though.
But then you have absolutely no authentication whatsoever. So anyone can join your server using any player name and it's difficult to effectively ban. Good maybe for small private servers, but won't work for anything public. Also IIRC then you get no user-selected player skins.
> But then you have absolutely no authentication whatsoever.
There are other ways. For a while, I played on a private Minecraft server which disabled authentication (for reasons; that server also had the mod which allows Bedrock players to connect to a Java server, which probably played a part). However, once you connected to that server, you had 30 seconds to type a command with a password, otherwise you'd be kicked out, and before entering that command, the player is frozen and has no access to the inventory. The closest analogue is IRC's NickServ.
That server also had a way to allow everyone to use their own user-selected player skins, even without authenticating to the skin servers, though I don't know the details on how that worked.
Does Minecraft ban/cancel people like PewDiePie as Roblox did?
Aren't monthly active users (MAU) around 100M for each?
I think Roblox is eventually doomed to slowly fizzle like Second Life, etc. Internet history is littered with the corpses of dead closed systems. Remember Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL? Remember Myspace?
Microsoft might eventually, say, install mandatory AI inside Minecraft that forces all players to behaviorally conform to the social and political views of the most vocal group of Microsoft employees. Then some other immersive 3D world builder with more open rules of participation will send Minecraft to its grave.