Everyone knows the tale of Brand X getting bought out by some faceless global conglomerate and going to shit, but does the opposite ever happen?

  • JakeBacon@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Minecraft maybe? I would say at the minimum it’s a net neutral but considering how far off the deep end Notch is now I imagine it was a good thing.

      • chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        If I had to pin an exact date on it, it’d be when he bought the most expensive mansion in Beverly Hills (at the time, $70M was a lot for a mansion).

        Why? Because you need to deal with life changes one thing at a time. Pro-tip for the future billionaires currently scrolling this comment section: don’t move away from your friends, family, and home country immediately after getting rich – it might screw with your head a little bit. Do what the old money does: stay grounded, dress down, and pretend to be normal.

      • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        There were hints that he was already on that path and realized that if he didn’t get off when he did, he would have taken his game down too.

      • WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Yeah - he decided he wanted a billion dollars more than he wanted his friends. All he had to do was share.

        • CmdrShepard@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          If you have to share your money for your friends to stick around you, they’re not really friends.

          In addition to suddenly being a billionaire, I’m sure life in the public eye didn’t help his situation at all, especially to someone who I imagine spends/spent a lot of time online reading comments from armchair psychologists speaking about him.

    • Neve8028@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      They’ve made some pretty awful changes to the game since. That being said, I bet minecraft would have fizzled out if microsoft didn’t purchase them. They’re still pumping out regular updates and its popularity is huge. I’d definitely consider the acquisition an overall win.

        • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Accidental delete.

          Like forcing everyone over to a microsoft account, which will sneakily force you to hand over your phone number for verification for “suspicious activity” ~1 week after registration, no matter what you do or don’t do.

          There was also something about channeling all server chat messages to a central filtering team/system, and irreversibly banning anyone who said something that’s not “child safe”, even if it was just on a private server where the measure was not turned off

          • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            I guess the Microsoft account thing I don’t really get, it wasn’t difficult to move it over in my experience but I already had several Microsoft accounts for Windows and Xbox stuff

            Idk about the filtering thing, i definitely don’t like it in theory but also haven’t seen anyone actually banned/muted due to it, definitely doesn’t make sense that it’s enabled by default on private servers, should have been a realms only thing, then again a majority of servers with most of the population likely aren’t on realms

            • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              I guess the Microsoft account thing I don’t really get, it wasn’t difficult to move it over in my experience but I already had several Microsoft accounts for Windows and Xbox stuff

              For new MS accounts they now require a phone number. Not at registration, but in a week after it.

        • Neve8028@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          The game has overall become way too easy. 1.14 villagers completely broke gameplay making trading and building iron farms way too boring. The pre-1.14 mechanics were way more balanced and fun. Raid farms are just way too powerful especially with the nerf to natural spawning that 1.18 brought making witch farms basically unusable. Loads of features like that which just made things too easy. It feels like you’re rewarded too much for very little effort.

          Chat reports and microsoft migration are also really controversial, of course.

          Not to say that they haven’t made lots of positive changes but that’s my main gripe with the development over the past few years.

          • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            I think it’s only easy if you know all the tricks for farming and whatnot, normal players wouldn’t likely say it’s too easy necessarily, I also didn’t notice any big change between 1.13 and 1.14 unless you mean the light level thing?

            People will always find a way to break the system, and for longtime Minecraft players, it’s nice not having to do all gathering by hand, instead being able to use your knowledge to create a ridiculous farm is… Cool imo.

            To be honest though, I can’t really get into vanilla in general, I’m always playing modded if I’m playing myself, tho I watch vanilla players like Hermitcraft

            • Neve8028@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              I also didn’t notice any big change between 1.13 and 1.14 unless you mean the light level thing?

              They entirely overhauled villager trading making it a game of just placing and breaking workstations to get the trades you want. The pre-1.14 mechanics were a lot better and more rewarding imo. Iron golem spawning was also totally overhauled and they’re just too dead simple these days. You can build a 900 ingot per hour farm in about 10 minutes or less.

              People will always find a way to break the system, and for longtime Minecraft players, it’s nice not having to do all gathering by hand, instead being able to use your knowledge to create a ridiculous farm is… Cool imo.

              I love farming, I’m a technical player so that’s my main focus. I’m saying that the recent changes have really diminished the skill and fun in creating certain farms. Like how portal based farms have been the new meta for basically everything. Just changing it so mobs have a cooldown period after spawning before they can go through portals would be a massive nerf and force people to actually develop cooler farm concepts.

              • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                But you’re a different kind of player then the “target” for these kinds of changes right? Think about kids playing Minecraft, you think they’re generally going to be setting up massive raid farms, shulker farms, etc? Probably not, they’d be playing it more “as expected”, which isn’t really “easy” unless you know the cheese farms you can build.

                Same kind of thing with storage, there’s tons of storage systems out there that you can use, but majority don’t know about it unless they go out and find the information online.

                • Neve8028@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  What’s great about minecraft is that it can be enjoyed by kids but there’s a lot of depth to what you can do as well. No one complained that it was too difficult to make iron farms before the changes. Also kids likely aren’t farming thousands of obsidian blocks to make portal based farms either. There’s a balance that can be made.

                  • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
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                    1 year ago

                    I agree but also don’t understand where your problem really is, like you want it to be more frustrating to use the non-intended things in the first place?

                    The fact that you can make crazy raid or iron farms isn’t a bad thing, compare that to how “normies” would play the game and how trying to balance the two would mean just overall worse experience for the normies most likely with more work needed also by the more in-depth farmers.

                    Rereading your prior response, I think I get where you’re coming from, but I feel like it’d be very hard to balance such a large difference between the player bases/styles, like if mob drops were nerfed then typical players would noticably get less loot, or some people aren’t into the designing aspect of farm creation but do it simply for the resources because they prefer to build or create redstone contraptions, idk.

      • AeroLemming@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Oh yeah, extreme censorship, shitty mob votes, and a DLC marketplace. So reinvigorated.

        • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          The whole ‘censorship’ narrative was a nazi psy-op. I literally didn’t even hear about it because I blocked all the mientubers for unrelated issues, and the one guy who did eventually tip me off its existence was essentially parroting talking points straight from that guy who I blocked after I caught him trying to groom his majority child audience that what Notch said on twitter was OK and he was being cancelled.

          Like obviously I don’t trust macroshaft to do any chat moderation since they seem to think cracker is a deeply offensive racial slur but ret–d is just harmless banter, but when literally everyone making a stink about it is either an outright nazi propagandist or has close ties to one, it’s hard not to see what’s going on.

          • Neve8028@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            The most concerning thing to me is the fact that they can ban users from playing on their own servers. Moderation should be on the server owners imo. Microsoft being able to ban someone from their own server that they self host or pay to host via a third party is a big issue.

            That being said, I don’t think that Microsoft’s moderation has been as apocalyptic as a lot of people made it out to be. It’s just the principle that I take some issue with.

              • Neve8028@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                That’s a security risk because users can log in as other users. Regardless, if you paid for the game, you should be able to play on third party multiplayer servers.

                • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 year ago

                  True on the risk aspect, there are authentication plugins you can get instead on the server side.

                  On the ban aspect, I don’t see people making this claim for Steam, if you get banned on Steam you lose all your games, not just a $30 purchase, and maybe don’t call people slurs in online text chat? Idk, it seems like it was just an overhyped concern with few actually getting banned that didn’t deserve it somewhat.

          • AeroLemming@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            I’m generally libleft and I’m quite upset about it. I bought the game. I own the game. They shouldn’t be allowed to take it away from me. What if you were gay and a car bricked itself because the manufacturer didn’t approve of you frequenting a gay bar?

        • Chee_Koala@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The censorship is kind of rediculous, tbh I thought that was in before Microsoft. Don’t see the rest as negative, and development seems more stable in the new groove, with regular larger updates. Couldn’t vote on mobs at all before, and there is DLC for Minecraft??

          • AeroLemming@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            All editions have DLC except Java. Many free Java features are paid in other versions. The problem with the mob vote is that they could totally just add all 3, but don’t.

    • WaxedWookie@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m not familiar with the detail of that one - was he always a lunatic, or did that come with the money following the buyout?

    • macisr@unilem.org
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      1 year ago

      I don’t know if it is better than when notch was in charge, but certainly they have updated it more frequently and have taken good care of it, true.

      • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I think it was at its best once Jeb started to take the reins. Notch wasn’t really good at adding features that were actually fun to play with. I liked that they were willing to take risks but that quickly soured as it pairs extremely poorly with their excessive traditionalism. It took like 5 years for them to undo the disastrous combat changes when it became quickly apparent that they sucked, and the hunger/sprinting mechanics are still a pure cancer to the experience to this day. I want to see them make big sweeping changes like in the earlier days while also not being afraid to dial it back or try again if it ends up not being fun.