eatonvilhelmsen50 - Tumblr blog

[eatonvilhelmsen50]

Minecraft and Microsoft What's Next?

Minecraft and Microsoft What's next? Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News

You can play Minecraft-maker Mojang to find out why Microsoft bought it.

The single-player game is about one person who can survive in harsh conditions with their ingenuity. Their survival is contingent on their building a home and battling monsters employing only the tools and weapons they can make by hand.

It's easy to interpret this as a reference to Markus "Notch" who was the game's creator If computer games were subjected to the same scrutiny as novels. He's been quoted in the past about growing to be "relatively poor", about making his own entertainment, and about whether he will have to conquer the same "demons" that plagued his father.

Family, friends and the popularity of the items Notch made by hand helped him succeed in this harsh world However, this success has brought other difficulties. They are more difficult to overcome.

Just what had changed was evident at Minecon in 2012 when it was difficult for Notch to walk more than a few feet before being grabbed by a fan who was eager to shake his hand, pat him on the back, snap pictures or ask him to sign their foam sword.

People are the power

He was never satisfied with his transition from a humble programmers who was responsible for his own code to a leading member of an entire movement. The reason he gave for the reason he's going to leave Mojang"it's about my sanity "it's about my mental health" - reaffirms the importance of sanity.

He's aware that Minecraft is about managing a community, not just creating and maintaining a codebase.

And therein lies the potential issue for Microsoft.

It has a solid history of managing massive computer infrastructures that support millions of users. This is evident in Xbox Live and other cloud services. This will be crucial when it starts running the behind-the-scenes systems that keep Minecraft going.

Microsoft will alienate this community when they don't recognize how personal the game is, not only for Notch but for all the other players who use it. It's where they make new friends, meet new people, and can express their individuality.

I've seen this with my own children who play it in different ways. One is a big fan of modified versions that involve arena battles or capture-the-flag-type competitions. The other spends hours creating intricate homes around minecart tracks that swoop. He often builds treehouses that span entire forests. They also frequently go on adventures with their pals in search of treasure, avoiding creepers and battling zombies, spiders and Skeletons.

This is possible because Minecraft allows for freedom and openness. Millions of people like them can do it. It is possible to alter the game according to their preferences due to its flexibility. It does this by giving players a level of accessibility that Microsoft in its business software, hasn't accepted. Srazy.info This is what has worried the millions of Minecraft users. These fans do not want Microsoft to restrict their freedom to design and alter the game as they wish. They feel a deep feeling of ownership over the games they make.

Microsoft will have to complete an extremely difficult jobdue to the importance of this community.

It will have to fight two of the biggest enemies of online gamers - downtime (aka delay) and delay. It is possible that any issue that arises with the game's performance in the near future will be blamed on Microsoft regardless of whether it's the company's fault or not.

Making more radical changes to the running of the game such as limiting the way that players can alter it, charging them for things that are currently free or restricting what they can share with the world about what they've done, could, if handled poorly, turn a big chunk of that community against Microsoft.

This is a problem, given that many of its users are children who will grow up to be the gamers of the future. No doubt Microsoft is hoping to impress them with how it manages Minecraft. If it gets it wrong, it could end up becoming one of the monsters that people would like to battle and defeat.