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Comment by ceeplusplus | Hacker News Reader

1. Minecraft has a lot of kids playing it, particularly kids whose parents blame Microsoft for poor behavior rather than learning to parent.

2. California recently passed a bill which would fine companies which fail to prevent kids from accessing features which are "detrimental" to children's health [1]. Naturally, Microsoft doesn't want to get fined for what edgy gamers say online.

3. (speculation) The censorship police that have infected every other major online platform have now reached gaming.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/30/californoa-childrens-onlin...

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My 12 year old has been bombarded with the message this is coming and will be the end of HyPixel/SkyBlock from many of the prominent Minecraft YouTubers he watches.

Let me tell you: if my money is down the drain because some little jackwagon mass-reports some random server and my kids’ accounts are locked, I’m gonna be fucking furious.

If the hoopla around this is true, Microsoft is going to relive its 1990s level hatred from the nerd community—just as parents instead of dorky teens and twenty-somethings running Linux.

Microsoft profits off Bedrock ("Minecraft for WIndows") because they can charge for basically everything, because there are no mods (addons). Java edition is where the mods are. Which is why hypixel/skyblock are on java edition. Ive seen speculation that Microsoft is adding this to have a process for banning java edition players. And then they just... stop selling java edition. Then there are no new java players ever again, and the existing player pool slowly dwindles because they either get banned, or their friends get banned and they don't want to play java alone, and the only option is to go to the microtransaction-fest that is bedrock. And now you live in their walled garden.

I would say that this is pure conspiracy level stuff, but that would be literally the final step of a EEE plan. Microsoft has done this before and there would be no surprise if they actually did that. Will they? I dunno, but it's overall a heavy handed bad move. Everything I've heard about the system is that it's not a great idea.

Sounds like they learned from Apple pretty well.

Speaking of Apple, this reminds me of the story that when Microsoft bought Bungie Studios in 2000, they got an angry phone call from Steve Jobs, since Bungie were the last big game studio that made games for Mac computers.

https://www.macrumors.com/2010/10/26/apple-history-jobs-rage...

What did Microsoft learn from Apple here?

Point of order - there are plenty of mods for Bedrock. Foxynotail has some great ones.

No, there are glorified command blocks for Bedrock. No actual mods exist anymore. At the beginning, MCPE had a handful of proper mods, but Microsoft after the acquisition did everything they could to kill those.

Semantics. They still modify the gameplay from vanilla, ergo they fit the definition if a "mod".

They just gave java edition to every bedrock owner, so I'm not very concerned about the "stopping sales" idea.

But this sure is a walled garden extension I don't like.

Ah, yes. Slowly ban the 30 million Minecraft Java owners by... letting users report them ? Goes right in line with removing all cars by increasing wind speed by 5% to increase gas consumption and frying every electronics by outputting 231v instead of 230v. Should only take about 50 years.

They aren't targeting all 30 million java owners. They are targetting the ones who are most likely to make microtransaction purchases, ie the people who are playing on heavily populated multiplayer servers (single players don't use chat so it wouldn't matter, etc). And from what I've seen, the report function is pretty easy to manipulate, so if you can't renew your account (granted, right now you can, but with microsoft, you never know), a large portion of that player base might wind up off java quickly.

Find the whales, force the whales to move to walled garden.

Granted that's still a dumb idea, because those people want to be playing Hypixel, which isn't on bedrock. So maybe this is just microsoft's move to say "See, no one is playing Java as much" so they can just stop doing java dev.

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