I mean, there are open-source clones, right, like Minetest, yes?
The angry Redditor wrote, “The fact they can just take away your license to the game like that is [expletive] insane. This is why I’ll never support DRMs, if a game has a DRM you do NOT own it. Only a license to temporarily play it.”
I mean, I get that complaint on a broader basis – and I think that that might be a problem moving down the line. If a company can buy a company that has sold you access to a game, and that company can cut off your access to that game, then they get leverage that they can use to extract other things out of you. Like, that is a real, legitimate issue. And it applies to anything that you buy digitally, not just games – books, music, software packages. If a vendor can change the terms on which you have access to the thing, they have ongoing leverage over the customer, and at some point, if a game isn’t generating an ongoing revenue stream, I can definitely imagine someone thinking “I can monetize this leverage”.
However, specifically for Minecraft, it seems kind of like complaining that someone is cutting off your access to Microsoft Solitaire. It might be annoying, but…you can go out and download a free and open-source package that can do essentially the same thing, yes?
Minetest isn’t really a substitute for Minecraft. Yes, its similar, but its far less polished, lacking in content, vanilla and otherwise, and is missing a lot of the technical functionality that makes much of Minecraft’s content (esspecially on the modding side) possible. Don’t get me wrong, I want to like it, and I’ve debated trying to contibute to it myself (although my skills are very lackluster) but as it stands its only really a substitute in the context of things like casually playing Pocket Edition.
Personally, Im more of a creative-mode player at the moment so the majority of the problems don’t affect me. Its also been a couple months since I last tried Minetest (mostly on Mineclone). From what I remember, my personal dealbreakers were:
IMO much uglier graphics, and more significantly, its harder to graphically customize with mods and resource packs. Maybe its more versitile than I’m giving it credit for, but at the very least, its not used as there aren’t enough modders and artists making content for the game to even remotely compete.
Performance - Minecraft may not be optimized, but I was getting much worse performance on Minetest. In particular, I was getting massive frame drops any time I placed or broke a block, making it extremely nauseating to play.
UX - There were a ton of small roadblocks to actually playing the game as I wanted to. First, customizing the graphics settings - the menu was disorganized and defaults were really weird for my hardware. Then, I had to find and edit the permissions file to be able to fly and sprint on my creative world. Even after that, if I remember right, the controls or flight movement were limitted or weird but in a way that couldn’t easily be fixed.
Lack of world editting commands - Im sure theres mods for this one, but its more work to find, figure out, and set up and by the time I got to this point, having to put in even more work just to make the game comparable was a dealbreaker.
I mean, there are open-source clones, right, like Minetest, yes?
I mean, I get that complaint on a broader basis – and I think that that might be a problem moving down the line. If a company can buy a company that has sold you access to a game, and that company can cut off your access to that game, then they get leverage that they can use to extract other things out of you. Like, that is a real, legitimate issue. And it applies to anything that you buy digitally, not just games – books, music, software packages. If a vendor can change the terms on which you have access to the thing, they have ongoing leverage over the customer, and at some point, if a game isn’t generating an ongoing revenue stream, I can definitely imagine someone thinking “I can monetize this leverage”.
However, specifically for Minecraft, it seems kind of like complaining that someone is cutting off your access to Microsoft Solitaire. It might be annoying, but…you can go out and download a free and open-source package that can do essentially the same thing, yes?
Minetest isn’t really a substitute for Minecraft. Yes, its similar, but its far less polished, lacking in content, vanilla and otherwise, and is missing a lot of the technical functionality that makes much of Minecraft’s content (esspecially on the modding side) possible. Don’t get me wrong, I want to like it, and I’ve debated trying to contibute to it myself (although my skills are very lackluster) but as it stands its only really a substitute in the context of things like casually playing Pocket Edition.
Just out of curiosity, what content is it that you play with on Minecraft that you’d like on Minetest?
Personally, Im more of a creative-mode player at the moment so the majority of the problems don’t affect me. Its also been a couple months since I last tried Minetest (mostly on Mineclone). From what I remember, my personal dealbreakers were:
IMO much uglier graphics, and more significantly, its harder to graphically customize with mods and resource packs. Maybe its more versitile than I’m giving it credit for, but at the very least, its not used as there aren’t enough modders and artists making content for the game to even remotely compete.
Performance - Minecraft may not be optimized, but I was getting much worse performance on Minetest. In particular, I was getting massive frame drops any time I placed or broke a block, making it extremely nauseating to play.
UX - There were a ton of small roadblocks to actually playing the game as I wanted to. First, customizing the graphics settings - the menu was disorganized and defaults were really weird for my hardware. Then, I had to find and edit the permissions file to be able to fly and sprint on my creative world. Even after that, if I remember right, the controls or flight movement were limitted or weird but in a way that couldn’t easily be fixed.
Lack of world editting commands - Im sure theres mods for this one, but its more work to find, figure out, and set up and by the time I got to this point, having to put in even more work just to make the game comparable was a dealbreaker.
Not quite the same as what was purchased… just let them download and play the old version they bought