Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pay08 | Hacker News Reader

I imagine it's far from the best-earning, though. It's a one-time purchase.

Skins, media packs, servers, hosted realms, upsales through all consoles, multiple copies for multiplayer with/between your kids… also a mass revolving shit tumbler of account stuff on the backend that invalidated lots of old accounts…

I bought during the beta for a lifetime of goodies, had to buy it again after the buyout, then again after an update to MS accounts wasn’t acted on, and then for the Switch. I’ve bought Minecraft 4 times, with another on the horizon if it keeps popular.

all of that except realms is bedrock edition, not the java one. I'm honestly pleasantly surprised they haven't killed the java version

That was probably their intention, but Bedrock has proven to be full of papercut sized bugs, and maintaining 1:1 behaviour with Java has also proven really difficult. Redstone is notably different/broken with the exception of trivial circuits.

Until it's possible to convert your world to Bedrock and not have anything in your 'finished' world break, except maybe some giant Redstone machine or one or two known annoyanced, I doubt they'd do it. Mojang presumably still has some autonomy within Microsoft so long as the money keeps coming in, and Mojang presumably knows that pushing this too early is a bad idea. But Microsoft being Microslop, who knows, maybe they'll just do it anyway.

I don't think 1:1 behaviour with Java was ever the intent. Redstone works differently due to a combination of different design choices, like not breaking in water (although I can imagine that being an accessibility thing for console players) and less technical debt, making things like movable tile entities possible.

I don't know what you mean by media packs, but the server software is free, and I believe all of the skins and maps released by Mojang itself on Bedrock's marketplace are also free. It's the third-party stuff that costs money, although I assume Mojang takes their cut.

They do have a bunch of add-ons now with Realms notably, but I wonder if this revenue goes to Mojang or to another Microsoft branch for tax reasons. To say nothing of derived media, plushies, Legos etc.

Fair, I completely forgot about Realms. I didn't know you could buy addons for them, though.

My kids have minecraft caps, tshirts, pants, pajamas, hoodies, lego, pencils, toys and probably other 100 things I do not remember right now

So no. It is not one time purchase.

You don't buy in-game money like GTA5, sure.

Then again, you'll never see a group of pre-schoolers wearing GTA5 hoodies and hats and backpacks, and you can't watch the GTA film in cinemas.

You need subscription for multiplayer

I don't think that's right. A Realms sub gives you a private server to play on but you don't need that. You can host your own for free.

On Xbox

This is an annoying and recent change; you used to be able to do local LAN multiplayer (even cross device!) before they changed something entirely.

At least split screen still works for free.

Nah, only if you're not willing to self host.

I run a 6 person server on an Intel NUC, without major issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com