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Comment by amiga | Hacker News Reader

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 I realize that "Embrace, extend, extinguish" is a hopelessly tired and outdated meme, but trying to freshen it up by arguing they've now reached a level where they are intentionally trying to kill their OWN products as part of some grand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.

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.

I support your decision to ban it in your household under that circumstance. If Microsoft gets to carpet-ban us and our kids from the game, we can carpet-ban them from us and our kids. Take your responsibility as a parent seriously, spend time and engage and take care of your kids, don't depend on big centralized computer systems to keep your children safe. Teach them why it's important, and they'll grow up to value individual freedoms.

Bedrock Edition and Java Edition licenses have been "merged."

That being said, if you're banning your kids from playing Minecraft because Microsoft Bad, that's just shitty.

They are perfectly happy playing in the current open ecosystem, why should they be forced to change?

I'm maybe being a bit dramatic by saying I'll ban them, but they will certainly be given a lesson on taking a stand, and if necessary making sacrifices, to defend freedoms and not give in to coercion.

It's not at all 'microsoft bad', except in this case, it seems they are.

Precisely, it's a teaching opportunity. My parents denied me certain things, and while I "hated" them for it sometimes, I have grown to understand why. It did have the very real cost of making socializing more difficult, and yet precisely that prepared me for this kind of sacrifice. Long term, I'm grateful for that, they were real, actual parents.

Why would you ban your kids from playing if Microsoft forced it to be on their servers?

If Microsoft wanted to extinguish self-hosted servers, all they would have to do is stop releasing the server jars and/or turn off authentication for non-Microsoft servers. They wouldn't spend so much time and energy pushing a controversial chat monitoring feature.

Java doesn't make them money outside of an initial purchase. Subscriptions to realms do. So, yes, EEE to an offering that was free to play after initial purchase.

Not to mention almost every addon/mod and cosmetic option in bedrock edition is money for them.

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

Thats certainly what they are currently doing with WSL

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 money?

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.

Nah, this take it just conflating unrelated historical talking points about Microsoft without regard to how specific things actually happen. A better question is: what incentive does Microsoft have to alienate its playerbase this way?

The answer is much more mundane corporate decision making dynamics: an online game played by children is ripe for abuse by predators, and someone representing PR or Legal won the argument that this functionality is necessary. It would have been great if someone representing Community, UX or Engineering could have won the argument, but sadly those arguments are harder to make in today's political climate, so that's where they landed.

> A better question is: what incentive does Microsoft have to alienate its playerbase this way?

It does continue to condition the peasant-consumer class, especially the young ones, that the products they pay for can be taken from them on the whims of their corporate overlords. That they should expect to censor themselves and each other to appease their betters. Xbox users learned this already (https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/03/27/microsoft-can-now-ba...), now minecraft users will lean their lesson, and tomorrow it will be Windows users (and therefore 80% of the worlds computer users) who will learn to obey Microsoft's will. Software is a Service and no matter what you paid or how long you've used it, that Service is still only a privilege. Displease your masters and that privilege can and will be taken from you.

Okay, that is an exaggeration, but not nearly as much of one as I'd like.

Absolutely.

I'm not endorsing the decision, I'm just saying this is how things happen in the corporate world. It has nothing to do with embrace/extend strategy, and it's not a product of Microsoft acquisition per se, it's just the way corporate decisions are made.

Keep in mind the people involved are no less smart than you or me, but they are responsible for single concerns, and the winning concern will be the one with the best narrative and metrics to back it up, because the tie-breaking executive will not have bandwidth to understand either side deeply. If we want to effect change, we first must understand this dynamic.

Embrace, Extract (wealth), Extinguish?

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