Minecraft is considered to be one of the most popular games of all time. With the game being released in 2009, it quickly grew in massive popularity in 2010 when it was brand new to YouTube. As of 2023, it still exceeds among the search trends when compared to other games and with new stuff related to mods, servers and updates coming out every single day. Unfortunately, as you can tell from the title of this post, Mojang and Microsoft are killing Minecraft as a whole. With new guidelines they've created surrounding their game, its only purpose is to protect their image and to basically create dire, yet strict rules to fuck over their community that they once grew up on. Veterans or Non-Veterans within the community.
The Main Issues:
The Nintendo Effect / Strict Guidelines & Hypocrisy:
A YouTuber/Lawyer by the name of Moon Channel made a video discussing the topic of Minecraft's new EULA so I recommend checking out his video on this subject. Now I haven't played Minecraft in quite a long time since 1.13 and 1.14. The reason for this is because I've been burnt out on the newer versions and because I didn't like the direction it was going especially for newer Minecraft YouTubers today. This is just my own opinion, so I don't care if you disagree with me.
Ever since Microsoft stepped in to either merge or acquire Mojang and to put the game on the Xbox consoles, I predicted that things were about to get ugly and indeed it has so it's one of those things that aged well. Typically, when you either buy software or games from a company, they usually come with End User License Agreements also known as EULA. Many of these are somewhat up to date to coincide by law and to discuss things related to privacy policy and ToS. Minecraft has been getting much stricter over the years enforcing rules that ruin the experience. Even they had a problem with the newer versions taking a lot of memory and a lot of ram.
Minecraft has also posted a thing called MUG which is an acronym for Minecraft Usage Guidelines which is basically the stricter rules that they have. There's a lot to go through (I may continue to update this) so let's start out with the first one and that is the Naming Guidelines. Typically, when you see a video that is Minecraft related, most of the time it has Minecraft in the title. Now you cannot use the word 'Minecraft' as either the primary or the dominant title. So, something like 'Depths of the Forest: A Minecraft Time Lapse Build' is allowed but 'Minecraft Mod Showcase Ep.5' isn't. I also want to point this out because people get this twisted. You can still use the word Minecraft in the title, you just have to rearrange it in a way that's to Mojang's liking. I mean come on, not having the Minecraft title in Minecraft related videos and having to go an extra step is really stupid and confusing.
We're not done yet as it progressively gets even more worse. A lot of EULA's typically have a personal and commercial use, limiting on what you can do with the brand or assets. Mojang back in the day really didn't care about it as much for people to sell merchandise of their brand but now they do. There are also things related to their brand that they want to protect. What they say about it whether if you talk about the game including images and assets on a forum post, blog or anything is considered under commercial use. If I made a build of a mansion and I wanted to share it to my friends or on any forum post, they'll most likely have a problem with it. Basically, enforcing players and their playerbase what they can and can't do. Mojang is trying to become the police, and everything is falling apart with the world of censorship.
Then you have the events whether if you do them In-Person or Live In-Game. Mojang added to the In-Person events section that you can host them but cannot exceed a limit of 150 participants. What makes this strange is that Minecon (one of the biggest conventions related to a game) probably goes over that limit year after year essentially just abusing it. To add insult to injury, the LiveIn-Game event section lets you have it for free virtually. This isn't 2020 anymore, were in 2023 for Christ's sake. What's also shocking is that 'they have the right to stop any event if it doesn't fallow the guidelines' and that is what happened to one convention called MineVention as well as all the future events. This happened back in May literally days before Mojang updated the Usage Guidelines. To add even more insult to injury, they clarified this in a Discord thread saying that they're not doing it to every single one but it would seem like it. It's very inconsistent.
Another problem is locked accounts. If you played on a Mojang account before, the chances you would get locked out is pretty common. However, roughly a year ago, Mojang reminded us that we needed to migrate our Mojang account to a Microsoft account. This year, they had a last call for the migration and for the people that didn't migrate, they would get locked out of their accounts. However even after the migration, people still had problems after the migration and that is they were still being locked out of their accounts. People started to ask questions on how to solve it. While the vast majority of them got the situation solved, others didn't from what I saw. They had released an article on their help center kind of going through the process.
So, you may be thinking, how does this play a role in The Nintendo Effect? Well, it's simple. As what we've seen so far from both Mojang and Microsoft (Mojang specifically), they've been kind of getting their ideas from Nintendo; defending their brand and shutting down events. It's exactly what Nintendo was doing with one of the most popular gaming franchise Super Smash Bros. With Smash World Tour, it was cancelled because Nintendo refused to grant a license for the people to host the event. With the people at MineVention, a license wasn't required but just 150 participants is such a small number for an event that had success from 2014. These rules are just like living in 1984. I don't know but what are your thoughts about this?
I will continue to post updates.
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