[amiga]

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.

[yodon]

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 I realize that "Embrace, extend, extinguish" is a hopelessly tired and outdated meme, but trying to freshen it up by arguing they've now reached a level where they are intentionally trying to kill their OWN products as part of some grand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

[jay_kyburz]

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.

[tomrod]

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.

[pythonlover2153]

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

[preisschild]

Thats certainly what they are currently doing with WSL

[karaterobot]

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?

[tomrod]

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.

[dasil003]

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.

[autoexec]

> 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.

[djbusby]

Embrace, Extract (wealth), Extinguish?