Everyone knows the tale of Brand X getting bought out by some faceless global conglomerate and going to shit, but does the opposite ever happen?
Minecraft maybe? I would say at the minimum it’s a net neutral but considering how far off the deep end Notch is now I imagine it was a good thing.
They’ve made some pretty awful changes to the game since. That being said, I bet minecraft would have fizzled out if microsoft didn’t purchase them. They’re still pumping out regular updates and its popularity is huge. I’d definitely consider the acquisition an overall win.
What awful changes
The game has overall become way too easy. 1.14 villagers completely broke gameplay making trading and building iron farms way too boring. The pre-1.14 mechanics were way more balanced and fun. Raid farms are just way too powerful especially with the nerf to natural spawning that 1.18 brought making witch farms basically unusable. Loads of features like that which just made things too easy. It feels like you’re rewarded too much for very little effort.
Chat reports and microsoft migration are also really controversial, of course.
Not to say that they haven’t made lots of positive changes but that’s my main gripe with the development over the past few years.
I think it’s only easy if you know all the tricks for farming and whatnot, normal players wouldn’t likely say it’s too easy necessarily, I also didn’t notice any big change between 1.13 and 1.14 unless you mean the light level thing?
People will always find a way to break the system, and for longtime Minecraft players, it’s nice not having to do all gathering by hand, instead being able to use your knowledge to create a ridiculous farm is… Cool imo.
To be honest though, I can’t really get into vanilla in general, I’m always playing modded if I’m playing myself, tho I watch vanilla players like Hermitcraft
I also didn’t notice any big change between 1.13 and 1.14 unless you mean the light level thing?
They entirely overhauled villager trading making it a game of just placing and breaking workstations to get the trades you want. The pre-1.14 mechanics were a lot better and more rewarding imo. Iron golem spawning was also totally overhauled and they’re just too dead simple these days. You can build a 900 ingot per hour farm in about 10 minutes or less.
People will always find a way to break the system, and for longtime Minecraft players, it’s nice not having to do all gathering by hand, instead being able to use your knowledge to create a ridiculous farm is… Cool imo.
I love farming, I’m a technical player so that’s my main focus. I’m saying that the recent changes have really diminished the skill and fun in creating certain farms. Like how portal based farms have been the new meta for basically everything. Just changing it so mobs have a cooldown period after spawning before they can go through portals would be a massive nerf and force people to actually develop cooler farm concepts.
But you’re a different kind of player then the “target” for these kinds of changes right? Think about kids playing Minecraft, you think they’re generally going to be setting up massive raid farms, shulker farms, etc? Probably not, they’d be playing it more “as expected”, which isn’t really “easy” unless you know the cheese farms you can build.
Same kind of thing with storage, there’s tons of storage systems out there that you can use, but majority don’t know about it unless they go out and find the information online.
What’s great about minecraft is that it can be enjoyed by kids but there’s a lot of depth to what you can do as well. No one complained that it was too difficult to make iron farms before the changes. Also kids likely aren’t farming thousands of obsidian blocks to make portal based farms either. There’s a balance that can be made.
None that I can think of.
And honestly Brand X is rarely the good guy in this situation being fucked over by the big bad corporations.
It is usually the creator/owner is looking for their payday. They may have created a great product but these days that is usually to make them attractive to be bought out.
In tech, for the last few decades, the goal of so many startups is not to be the next Apple/Google/Facebook but to create something that Apple/Google/Facebook want to buy.
Motorola, while it was owned by Google, was actually quite good. The Moto g and the Moto x line were started in that era. The original Moto x was one of the best looking phones I’ve ever used.
Matt Stone and Trey Parker bought the real Casa Bonita and improved everything all around; from the decor and atmosphere, the food and drinks, and pays the staff, IIRC, $32/hour.
It’s not a big conglomerate, but it’s the closest example I could even think of.
GitHub started adding new good features after being acquired by Microsoft
Mixed feelings on this one; I think the jury is still out. I think I preferred GitHub being independent and focused on hosting source code and reviewing merge requests. But… I’m not sure if the product would’ve ended up any better without being under Microsoft.
Microsoft lately seems to take pretty hands off approaches and follow the “don’t fix what isn’t broken” rule well, which seems to be working for them.
didn’t they like… scrape everyone’s open source code for an ai and then gatekeep that shit to their own infra?
Oculus. No way they would have otherwise had the money to make cheap standalone VR headsets like the Quest.
No way would they have forced you to sign up to/in to meta either though.
Everything that has a store requires an account.
- Steam - you need Steam account (also applies to Valve Index then)
- iPhone - you need Apple account
- Android phones - you need Google account
- Oculus before - you needed an Oculus account
The short time during which they required a Facebook account (i.e. an account linked to an unrelated service) was a fuck-up, but they have since reversed that decision. Now it’s just a separate standalone VR-related account.
If anything, that is still better than the current Google/Apple situation with their accounts, which link together a bunch of unrelated services (photos, email, payments, storage sync, etc.) in an inseparable way.
Sorry to break it to you bruh, but if Facebook owns the IP, they’re harvesting and monetizing the account data, end of.
This includes all of the subsidiaries like Instagram and WhatsApp as well.
Let’s also not forget that illegal activity exposes user data in addition to greed, and just the fact that your data is in yet another pot increases your risk. Also yes all corporations are greedy and evil but they’re definitely not all equal in how bad they are, and FB is one of the worst
Are you willing to compromise on all of these intrusions into your life? Many people are, but I’m not one.
