Aaaand now we know why they want Microsoft accounts for Minecraft so badly ...
You know, because Minecraft is a game targeted at kids. And maybe you don't someone spouting racist/sexist garbage at them all day.
This is Microsoft, and in a competitive landscape, no less. Not sure if this maps.
Moderation is hard work, expensive, and doesn’t scale. And Minecraft doesn’t have even a theoretical sinister benefit of being able to sway public opinion with it. It’s just a cost center to keep the ecosystem non-toxic.
And yet they are seeking the power to ban people from playing on their own private servers. It's a blatant power grab, but I guess it not real authoritarianism unless they're laughing like a cartoon villain when they do it, right? Give me a break. All corporations are power hungry by nature; and the largest and most powerful of them have demonstrated this nature time and time again to become the way they are today.
Well two of them at least.
I don’t want Microsoft to police what sort of speech my kids are and aren’t allowed to have, nor do I want them to get to decide what the consequences for breaking the rules are.
What I’d like to be able to do is set up a server and let our kids and their friends play on it, without anyone else. That would protect the kids just fine.
This doesn’t take a globally unique Microsoft account, it takes a player guid. I’m pretty sure the capability is all there, too, but they just decided to lock it behind their ecosystem.
A survival game where you are utterly alone fighting zombies and all kinds of monsters that come at night while you have no weapons or shelter.
Yeap... kids stuff.