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Comment by hastily3114 | Hacker News Reader

Why are they even maintaining two versions of the same game?

As far as I remember the original plan was to only maintain both in a transitional phase, with the aim of fully replacing the Java edition. A simple plan: bring Bedrock to feature parity with Java, add a modding API that satisfies 95% of use cases, then force everyone onto Bedrock. The feature parity is mostly there, but modding in Bedrock seems to have become a non-goal, and Bedrock has so many bugs that if your platform offers the choice between both Java is still preferred even if you don't care about modding.

Such a colossal waste..

I still don’t understand what problem Bedrock Edition solves. I guess it was for consoles that don’t support Java?

Yes, and performance. Java edition is slow as hell in comparison, it just doesn't matter on PCs too much unless you really mod it.

Ironically, it was originally built to support Android phones.

Pocket Edition was a stripped down version of the game to support the xperia play, so it was built for optimization from the start. Later it got support for broader Android devices and iOS, while Mojang outsourced console development to 4J studios. Eventually, they decided to beef up Pocket Edition to be mostly feature complete with Java, renamed it Bedrock, and made it the de facto standard for all devices, sunsetting 4J's port.

> As far as I remember the original plan was to only maintain both in a transitional phase

Is there a source for this? I don't remember any language to suggest Java Edition would eventually be replaced when they announced Windows 10 Edition. They've always indicated that they intend to keep maintaining the Java Edition, with parity in the core game. The messaging here has never changed, as far as I'm aware.

I'm not sure there are any direct quotes to that effect. But for four years the name of Bedrock Edition was simply "Minecraft" or "Minecraft for Windows", with the previous Minecraft becoming "Minecraft: Java Edition".

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/all-news-e3

https://minecraft.wiki/w/Bedrock_Edition#Nomenclature

That's still the official name of bedrock, but it was never meant to establish a hierarchy or a plan for ending Java, they always seemed very careful in their words to avoid making it sound like it does.

If anything, they might have just done the rename simply for standardization over 9 different app stores with different requirements, branding requirements, and length limits before truncation occurs.

Put more simply, a large proportion of the existing playerbase, including most large content creators, despises Bedrock.

Java is for the modding user-base. If they would kill that, there is a good chance that the whole Youtube/Twitch creator ecosystem around the game dies, and with that it's popularity.

Bedrock is more performant and more portable across platforms (e.g. on consoles where you couldn't mod anyways).

It won't die. Its not a problem to skip auth checking if at some point MS tries to use kill switch (hopefully EU would make that fully legal in EU if that's not provided by the company).

As for feature parity, there are mods backporting modern features back to 1.7.10.

Java is also portable to all the consoles, its just Microsoft did use that as an argument to try to kill the Java Edition. Nobody prevented Microsoft from adding bedrock like modding to Java Edition.

The only thing that needs to happen is the one single stable mod API for Minecraft Java Edition. The incompatibility between Forge, NeoForge, Fabric, etc. is terrible, but from what I know about some of the folks involved this won't happen as they cannot constructively discuss the matters.

Wrong kind of death. Taking mods away after a decade and a half of the game being modded inside out would massively reduce the creative scope of the game for players. It would become "boring" and die out

They wanted everything on bedrock but they can’t do it, and losing the Java modding ecosystem would literally kill the game, which remains popular because of all the YouTube content, 90% of which is Java (even unmodded).

Much of the cashflow is from kids watching a YouTuber doing something in Java Minecraft and attempting it themselves in bedrock, which is why feature parity is the only thing they’re really working on anymore.

(Not saying you are but) I think people here are overstating modding and understating Bedrock's inferiority for content creation. The bugs, the differing technical surface and redstone logic, the basic missing key technical features from Java, like the F3 menu. Yes modding is a huge factor, but even if they released an amazing Bedrock modding API 3 years ago, Java would still be dominant in the content creation community and therefore still be the lifeblood of the game.

Bedrock is aimed at kids and they've never made any real effort to supplant Java with it. It's just a very effective way of hitting different target markets

That's the underlying reality - they wanted Bedrock to unify all the non-PC platforms (phones, consoles, etc) and they succeeded on that.

They have no need to supplant Java, nor any desire to (and all their marketing materials and screenshots are usually Java anyway).

Because they aren't the same, Bedrock is more limited in modding capabilities, and the Java community doesn't care about it.

Microsoft logically wants to keep sales from both.

Discontinuing Java would make a lot of players stop playing (including me).

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