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Comment by sid0 | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK a very restricted version of Minecraft is coming to the 360.

That's true, but then I'm not sure why a less restricted Minecraft on Steam on the PC is a problem... I'd actually buy it then.

I do very little PC gaming these days, 100% of it via titles bought on Steam -- people can argue about the DRM issues with it all day long, but the cloud features of it that allow me to access my game library from whichever of my computers I am currently logged into is huge as is the centralized updating, etc. I realize I'm hardly representative of the entire PC gaming world (since I'm barely a PC gamer anymore), but if it isn't on Steam it doesn't really exist for me and I'd love to pay for and play a slightly dumbed down Minecraft.. looks like I'll have to do that on the 360 instead of on the PC.

You can download minecraft from any computer here:

http://www.minecraft.net/download.jsp

The client is self-updating.

What about Minecraft's distribution method makes you not want to use it? You buy the game and are given an account, then you can use that account anywhere and everywhere on any operating system. You just log in when you start the game.

...except when the authentication server (which is also the website, because separation of concerns is for suckers!) is down because the entire company has taken a trans-Atlantic flight to go bask in the adulation of their fans, without so much as a single backup plan. Like they did earlier this year.

Last week, though--last week, they learned! They left one guy behind to deal with any problems that occurred. Of course, that one guy, whose entire capability to fix problems was "bounce the server", spent seven hours in a pub getting plastered while their authentication server was down again. True to form, they treated it as "lulz" instead of taking some responsibility for the screw-up.

So I can't blame people for wanting to stick to Steam. They at least have those "IT people" for fixing problems.

When the authentication server went down my second week of trying out Minecraft, my copy kept working (with a dialog on startup letting me know that auth had failed).

I agree that it is embarrassing for a company demoing at a conference to have a protracted outage on their website, but the impact on current users should have been nil.

Have they made the DRM stickier since I last played?

You can't play online if the auth server is down, IIRC, unless you're playing on a server that doesn't authenticate. Which is kind of a problem.

Ah, I was mostly a "putter in the corner by myself" kind of minecrafter, so I never tried multiplayer. I agree that that is a problem, yikes!

Minecraft on 360 is never going to be more than a niche, given the type of game it is. If it's available through Steam, however, the majority of PC players will end up buying through Steam and that population will pressure the non-Steam PC players to move to Steam.

There's precedent for games purchased outside of Steam being available in steam, so there's no technical barrier to giving all existing Minecraft owners a copy of the Steam version.

But when Notch says that he is avoiding Steam due to the restrictions it will place on what he can do with Minecraft in the future, I'm not sure why this would be a positive outcome from Notch's perspective.

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