Microsoft to buy Minecraft?

[Simon]

Well... I hate to play devils advocate here, but I suspect most of you know what EULA stands for? Especially the last 2 letters. Meaning you never "own" the software you purchase. Roughly about 4 years ago I bought "Star Trek Online" (STO) and paid a monthly fee to play. Today you can download and play for free. Also 2½ years ago, I purchased Guild Wars knowing they would be releasing the sequel in six months and the original could shut down at any time. Most of the time, I don't think much of buying games to be a permanent fixture in my life. I still have some old Windows games on the shelf I bought from bargain bins at the Devonshire Mall years ago. Not all of these work well with WINE but I hang on to them all the same.

Now placing the patch on my right eye and my pirate hat on... IF the game sells out to Microsoft, not all the users will abide by the licensing agreement. Technically if you have paid for the game and are playing it on their server, then you are not the one breaking the EULA in most cases. I might not play Minecraft but I know how you feel. STO made by Cryptic was purchased by Perfect World Entertainment (now calling themselves Arc Games) they ruined the game when it went free to play. The game became the land of lock boxes for which you need only pay a dollar for a key. If I want to gamble, I go to the casino. Development, quality, and story took a backseat to making money.

[GreyGeek]

Although it is not a game, I found an interesting and highly educational application from SteamLinux called "Universe Sandbox2"
My younger grandson enjoyed creating nukes and blowing things up in Minecraft. I think he will enjoy ramming asteroids into Mars.
My older grandson is a 7th grader taking pre-calculus. He might find it interesting to test Velikovsky's theory that Venus was a comet ejected by Jupiter and as it flew by Earth and Mars several times in its elliptical orbit it, and Mars, became the source of 7th and 8th century BCE stories of planetary disasters, before flinging Mars out of its orbit between the Earth and the Sun and into its present orbit, while itself ending up where it is currently at. (Well, if he won't I will )

[Simon]

And people thought I was weird for reading "Worlds in Collision" But I think your grandson might have even more fun with Spore. It is one of those bargain bin software games I got at the mall. While I know it is available on Steam, I don't think there is a Linux port. You can pick it up on Amazon for $13 which is $3 more than I paid at the mall.

[kernelbasher]

Games don't interest me, so that's a bonus.

I don't know when you find time to do all this playing.

Ref: to the OP
I thought silverlight was shelved

My Son plays this game and loves it, but he's on windows lol

[GreyGeek]

Games don't interest me, so that's a bonus.

I don't know when you find time to do all this playing.

They don't really interest me either, but they interest my grandsons and anything we can do together is of interest to me.

Ref: to the OP
I thought silverlight was shelved

Silverlight was announced in Sept of 2007 and at the 2008 Chinese Olympics it demonstrated its abilities on the ceiling of the "Bird Nest" when it crashed and displayed the BSOD to all the watching world. Later that same year a .NET application written by Adventur and Microsoft for the London Stock Exchange crashed for the second time, and put the LSE offline for a day, costing it over $1B dollars. The LSE replaced that .NET app with a Linux version run on Linux servers.

Microsoft did announce that Silverlight was going to be replaced with HTML5 as Microsoft's major dev tool, but the independent developers, who had invested thousands of dollars and hours in the development of their .NET/Silverlight apps staged a revolt and forced MS to reconsider. IMO, MS decided to use the same tactic on Silverlight that they used on Visual FoxPro, death by a thousand cuts. (Fortunately, lemons turned to lemonade because it forced me to abandon VFP and look for a new tool. I found the Qt API. ) Over the next six years Sliverlight will bleed to death.

However, that said, Silverlight is still being developed by Microsoft. The latest release is 5.1.30514.0(May 14, 2014)
Netflix has said it is switching away from Silverlight by 2020 regardless of what Microsoft does.

.NET is still Microsoft's main dev tool. One of the dev tools I used in my consulting business, PowerBulder, has gone totally .NET, but it doesn't have near the following it did when I was using it at version 3.

Linux had a Silverlight clone called Mono, but it was dropped in 2012 by Michael De Icaza (its creator) because of lack of adoption in the Linux community. Icaza moved to the Mac platform. Some think MS dropped Silverlight because it offered a pathway to migrate apps off of the Windows desktop and onto Linux, freeing users from Windows, but most Linux fans think it was a Trojan Horse designed to entrap the Linux desktop in a web of Microsoft patents.

HTML5, Silverlight's supposed replacement, is a write once, use on any platform, and pretty much is, if you avoid proprietary extensions. However, it has not taken the world by storm because its performance playing videos has not been up to expectations. The demos always run faster than the real world examples. FlashPlayer is still the major web video display tool.

[kernelbasher]

@GreyGeek
wow. Great insight - thanks

[Simon]

Games don't interest me, so that's a bonus.

I don't know when you find time to do all this playing.

Sometimes I play on stuff on my lunch hour at the clinic. Other times I don't feel like going out with friends and want to stay home and pout. I squeeze in a hour or two each day for PC games. But there are some people like my friend Wendy who plays a lot of games. She played one game that tracks time you play and she claims over 3,000 in just under 3 years! That is like a part time job. Also be mindful she told me this is just one game and she plays many. I cannot say I blame her, since she is retired and disabled.

Teens I run into daily can't seem to leave the games at home with their hand held devices I believe most of them play a lot more hours than Wendy ever will.

[MoonRise]

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/video-ga...g-2-5b-n203556

Oh well, beginning of the end!

[GreyGeek]

From that headline it looks like Microsoft has upped the ante to $2.5B.

Notch, you've betrayed your principles of you go through with the deal. You earned $101M in 2012 alone. For 2013 ($197M) and the most of 2014 (even more) I suspect that you've added $400M to that sum. Over half a billion dollars! You'd have to spend $34K/day for the next 40 years to get rid of it all. Or buy an island with mansion at some safer place in the world.

How much more do you need? Are taxes on wealth in Sweden that high that only Microsoft can bail you out? Or, are you wanting to make a name for yourself as a big philanthropist, like Bill Gates? </sarcasm>

[HalationEffect]

Many valid concerns about what MS will do with Minecraft, but for me the most terrifying possibility is:





On a more serious note, Ars Technica had an article yesterday about the Mojang sale. If their analysis is accurate, Minecraft players should have little to worry about.

And on that note, I'm diving back into my Minecraft world so I can yell some more at the endermen who keep messing up my neat lawn! And don't even get me started on those sneaky creepers...

[MoonRise]

endermen who keep messing up my neat lawn!

Yes, I do hate how they do that!

[GreyGeek]

Enderman don't spawn in areas only two blocks high! And they can't attack if you stay under a two block high ceiling. Makes it easy to kill them!

It looks like MS upped the ante to $2.5B and signed the deal with Mojang, but they didn't get Notch or the other guy. And, they promised not to move the Mojang office out of Sweden for two years. That gives the developers two years to look for local work, if any is around.

And, I suspect that $29 won't get you both the client and the server, or unlimited version updates either. I'd wager MS will introduce a version update fee of around $10 and market the server as a separate program for an additional license fee. Versions of Mincraft 1.74 and higher allows one to open a map as a single player and then switch it to multiplay without starting the server version. I also suspect that if MS markets the server version separately they'll disable this new single-to-multiplayer ability.

Most media comments suggest that Microsoft will use the Tablet and smartphone versions of Minecraft to drive their Windows phone sales. That will drag Minecraft into a bottomless pit.

[MoonRise]

[HalationEffect]

Yes, I do hate how they do that!

You can prevent endermen from doing any amateur landscape gardening by entering the command

/gamerule mobGriefing false

but it has a few side effects: creeper explosions won't damage any blocks (but will still hurt you), the wither won't be able to break blocks (makes for an easy fight if you pick a location with a low-ish ceiling), and the new villager ability to harvest crops will be disabled.

[GreyGeek]

"/gamerule mobGriefing false" is about half way to using "/gamemode 1", which is the creative mode, and allows one to fly without an mod.