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True, but I find it amusing that none of that even mattered and the community was persistent enough to build an entire architecture, database and IRC bot solely

True, but I find it amusing that none of that even mattered and the community was persistent enough to build an entire architecture, database and IRC bot solely for deobfuscating the source of Minecraft anyways. So long as nobody would get sued for it, it was still possible from a technical standpoint, so the motivated people did it anyways. And now it seems that Twitch and other "official" entities have conceded to the fact that modding was really the only reason so many people play Minecraft at all and they integrated installing mods into their official launcher. Server hosting for Minecraft is a legitimate business since you'd need enough RAM and single-core performance for mods also, so they advertise "mod-capable" hosting plans. On top of that the entire decompiled and deobfuscated source of Minecraft 1.22 is sitting on GitHub to search through. The sheer extent of modding capability that Java enabled caused this weird conflict between the interests of the parties wanting to retain the intellectual property of the game through obfuscation while at the same time admitting that people undoing it and using the source themselves for modding is never going to go away, and trying to forcefully get rid of it for the sake of this legitimacy anyways brings no benefit and would only anger and drive away the audience who already comes to expect mods. And then some group would probably just hack together some unsanctioned server/client package from the JARs that are already widespread and keep playing the old versions forever, since they'd still want to play modded Minecraft anyways, and there's no reason the whims of a few corporations ought to invalidate the past several years of modded Minecraft experience they've lived through already. At least it's a better case for modding than purely competitive games since a lot of Minecraft is about construction. Sometimes I think that the only games that will truly last for the ages where new things are still being created and discovered regularly are the ones whose source code is in the control of the players, and they aren't actively poached for "stealing" in an attempt to extract a few more dollars per person. That, and the playerbase being motivated enough to keep developing content for them. It seems Minecraft is one of those few games as of present.

bobthepanda 6y ago
> That, and the playerbase being motivated enough to keep developing content for them. This by far is the most important thing. You could have a beautiful open source game but if no one knows about it or wants to play it, it's less than useful. Some of the biggest modding communities I am aware of came from closed-source games; the Sims has always had strong, years-long modding lifetimes, and SimCity 4 and Cities Skylines after it had total overhaul mods that changed entire game systems, as well as thriving communities of less ambitious mods.

bobthepanda 6y ago

> That, and the playerbase being motivated enough to keep developing content for them. This by far is the most important thing. You could have a beautiful open source game but if no one knows about it or wants to play it, it's less than useful. Some of the biggest modding communities I am aware of came from closed-source games; the Sims has always had strong, years-long modding lifetimes, and SimCity 4 and Cities Skylines after it had total overhaul mods that changed entire game systems, as well as thriving communities of less ambitious mods.