As for us spinning our "personal hell", we are going by experience with how Microsoft has dealt with companies in the past. It isn't just one incident. Or a handful. There is a long standing history here. They strip out features, paywall them away, and expect the consumer to be happy. Great example is Microsoft Office, one of their own products. I bought Office 2000 years ago when my ex wanted it. It cost nearly $900 and came with a three PC licence. Right now, today, you can buy the latest Office for $399 per PC, but without any tablet apps or smartphone access. To get those, you have to subscribe.
Asheron's Call was murdered by them, because they never understood the community that played the game. Sysinternals was locked up in the vault instead of allowing people to keep using it for free. Rare was gutted after Microsoft couldn't force out a good game from them. The list goes on and on and on. Company after company devoured by Microsoft, then torn about.
Notch bailed out, regardless of reason, and ensured he had a gold parachute while doing it. If he honestly cared about the community, he would have just made arrangements to continue to receive proceeds from his creator, and left the company.
1. Asherons Call was created by Turbine Entertainment and published by Microsoft. Microsoft owned the IP. Turbine bought all the rights to the franchise from Microsoft in 2004. That is when it started to die, for the most part- either way, MS owned it at the start, so it's hardly an example of Microsoft buying a company and then killing it in any fashion.
2. Rare continued to make games after MS bought them.Rare more or less "gutted" itself (and perhaps Mojang will too, who knows), because several key people left. (Something like Rockstar in ~2006).
3. Pretty much all the sysinternals tools have been kept updated by Mark, and are freely available. It's hard to find I guess, having to google for "sysinternals" and follow the first link and all. You can download them here. I particularly like the GPU meter that was added a few versions ago in Process Explorer.
4.Regarding Office, you make the rather common and strange effort to purposely skew your facts. For example- you state "I bought Office 2000 years ago when my ex wanted it. It cost nearly $900 and came with a three PC licence." This is an interesting claim, because Standard Edition cost $499, as did Small business. Professional was $599. Premium was $799. The Developer Edition- for designing and building Office plugins, primarily- was $999. So you either got the Developer or Premium Editions, which makes me question why. Few people use the suite applications outside Word and Excel. It's not like Project or OneNote are particularly valuable components of the suite. Even Publisher took a backseat because of other programs that are superior such as Aldus PageMaker. Also, none of those retail versions came with three licenses. Rather, starting with Office 95 (at least) A license for an Office Program allows you to install it to one desktop and one laptop. I believe this may have existed with Office 4.2 also (Word 6, Excel 5, Powerpoint 4, and Access 2)
5. Continuing Office, "Right now, today, you can buy the latest Office for $399 per PC, but without any tablet apps or smartphone access. To get those, you have to subscribe."
Office 2013 Home & Student is $140. Home and Business is $220. Professional is $400. These are not subscription based licenses. You are thinking of Office 365, which is a different product and designed to provide Google-drive like features for Office applications. it is primarily appealing for companies that want to keep their data more centralized- for your typical home user, Google Apps will usually fit the bill for that. (Though to be honest, what most people need isn't outside the ability of Wordpad anyway)... Office 365 is 69$ for the personal edition, for a year-long subscription. This let's you use it on one PC/laptop and one mobile device. I think you might be confusing Office 365 (which has tablet/mobile capabilities) with Office 2013 (the latest standalone Office Suite) which doesn't have mobile capabilities.
"As for us spinning our "personal hell", we are going by experience with how Microsoft has dealt with companies in the past. It isn't just one incident. Or a handful. There is a long standing history here."
Most of what you've stated is either false (your claims regarding Asheron's Call and SysInternals) or misleading, either purposefully or by accident (confusing, it seems, Office 2013 with 365). You just pulled dollar figures out of your butt and figured nobody would call you on them. Well I did. You would have had to get essentially the higher-tier edition of Office to have paid 900$ for Office 2000 (something you've conveniently forgotten), and no edition of Office 2013 is $399.
When you have to lie and make things up while arguing that anybody or anything is immoral, that is particularly ironic.
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the examples you gave are extremely old, made by a Microsoft company that wasn't nearly as in touch with the communities that use the products as they do today. I won't even touch the Office example, but to point directly to AC, when this occurred it was 2004. Just to give you an idea of how everything in tech has changed since then, Google launched their IPO in 2004. Internet Phone services like Skype and Vonage were just becoming popular. The iPhone wasn't even a glimmer in Apple's eyes yet, with the iPod being the big seller of the year. iTunes as a service had only been available for the PC for about a year, and was just beginning to get a big catalog of music. Firefox was just becoming a thing and Chrome didn't even exist. Oh, and let me not forget that most of the people pitching a fit on these forums were still wearing diapers, apparently. Edit: Add to that list that the XBox 360 hadn't even launched yet.
The Microsoft of today is not perfect, but much more in tune with gamers. They gave in when they realized that the directions they were taking with the XB1 were wrong (although people still flamed them for buckling under public pressure, which just shows how you really can't please anyone nowadays). Microsoft supported indie developers far before Sony did, to their credit (and that's respect coming from someone who prefers playstation over xbox) and despite the FUD flying around, they did not pioneer pay walls, DLC, or subscription services in gaming. As a reasonable human being and also a fan of minecraft since I bought the game in Alpha (circa Halloween Update when the Nether was added to the game), I am of course always nervous when something I enjoy playing changes ownership, especially from a small dedicated group of people like Notch, Jeb, and company. But I crack up laughing at reading some of the garbage flying around on these forums, and can only help to think that many people here act like my 7 year old son. Fast to overreact, quick to whine when he doesn't get his way, and thinks he knows a lot more than he really does. Why don't we all take a deep breath, let this settle in, and see what happens. If and when the sky falls, by all means abandon ship. Or quit now, I don't really care. Honestly I feel like this community could use a culling, seeing how a lack of maturity from his fans basically drove Notch away from Mojang.
And if somehow it all falls apart, it was a great ride. There is not a single game with a dedicated community that I've played that hasn't at some point declined to the point where it was no longer still a compelling experience, and Minecraft won't be an exception to that. One day years from now, it won't be the same, but that's true in all of life. Nothing lasts forever. If the plug was pulled on the game today, I got my money's worth, for sure. Thanks Notch for all that you did for us, and thanks Jeb for taking over and giving your all to this game, and hopefully we'll be thanking someone else (or perhaps still Jeb, no indication yet whether he's even leaving) a year from now for a continued wonderful experience.
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How is this an anti trust issue? Please explain this to me (this should be really entertaining)
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According to Phil Spencer, Microsoft will continue support for the game as well as continued development amongst ALL platforms. http://www.joystiq.com/2014/09/15/microsoft-confirms-acquisition-of-minecraft-studio-mojang/
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But really, how about grow up much
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Nice to see someone else not losing their head over this without waiting to see what will happen. The amount of FUD flowing around in here is flat out amazing, and not in a good way.
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Now he'll be able to survive 100 years after he stops making money
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Why would MS spend 2.5 billion on a franchise only to torpedo half of the user base? That makes no financial sense, much less sense from a perspective of trying to increase the brand going forward.
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No they didn't. In fact, they said quite the opposite, stop making up stuff. They specifically said that you cannot sell in game currency for real money. That's actually one of the freaking bullet points in the FAQ for the EULA changes.