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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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

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