Mojang's relationship between its users, modders and people who run its servers has been going downhill to the point that I can fairly say that Mojang has practiced Embrace, Extend and Extinguish and to a fairly effective degree (and this is before Microsoft bought Minecraft).
At first Minecraft was a simple game but it caught on and a modding toolkit called Bukkit was created. Basically Bukkit was violating copyright law by patching Minecraft but Mojang let it happen because it makes the game usable in multiplayer settings. Minecraft has had the notion of servers but to actually administer a server you need bukkit to effectively police your server.
One of the oldest running servers of Minecraft is mcpublic (https://nerd.nu). This is a community run server which has fundraising drives. I was a mod and there was a very complex nonprofit (we had a notion of VPs, Managers and Moderators and the staff consisted of more than 20 people).
Minecraft wouldn't be there without modders patching their game or any multiplayer aspect. Then Mojang vaguely announced a modding API and never released it (it was vaporware). They hired key people on Bukkit. As Minecraft grew so did the modding community and also for profit servers.
Many people note that there are servers that are predatory and seem to take advantage of children with credit cards. I don't disagree about this point. But there is a great amount of modders that are technically skilled and enjoy the game. They don't actively ask for money and they are who helped make the game work in a multiplayer environment. Minecraft created realms and this is where they started of the extend part of the journey.
After awhile once Notch got fed up with Minecraft and wanted to sell out is when everything really started to go downhill. To extinguish modding would require them to just start enforcing the copyright that they were neglecting. Minecraft was built on modders but didn't need them and were a liability if they were to sell to Microsoft. Once wolverness performed the DMCA on bukkit thats when pretty much most people started giving up on modding. When mojang started banning servers that was pretty much the end and I only think that there will be non profit servers for the original java version of Minecraft.
At first Minecraft was a simple game but it caught on and a modding toolkit called Bukkit was created. Basically Bukkit was violating copyright law by patching Minecraft but Mojang let it happen because it makes the game usable in multiplayer settings. Minecraft has had the notion of servers but to actually administer a server you need bukkit to effectively police your server.
One of the oldest running servers of Minecraft is mcpublic (https://nerd.nu). This is a community run server which has fundraising drives. I was a mod and there was a very complex nonprofit (we had a notion of VPs, Managers and Moderators and the staff consisted of more than 20 people).
Minecraft wouldn't be there without modders patching their game or any multiplayer aspect. Then Mojang vaguely announced a modding API and never released it (it was vaporware). They hired key people on Bukkit. As Minecraft grew so did the modding community and also for profit servers.
Many people note that there are servers that are predatory and seem to take advantage of children with credit cards. I don't disagree about this point. But there is a great amount of modders that are technically skilled and enjoy the game. They don't actively ask for money and they are who helped make the game work in a multiplayer environment. Minecraft created realms and this is where they started of the extend part of the journey.
After awhile once Notch got fed up with Minecraft and wanted to sell out is when everything really started to go downhill. To extinguish modding would require them to just start enforcing the copyright that they were neglecting. Minecraft was built on modders but didn't need them and were a liability if they were to sell to Microsoft. Once wolverness performed the DMCA on bukkit thats when pretty much most people started giving up on modding. When mojang started banning servers that was pretty much the end and I only think that there will be non profit servers for the original java version of Minecraft.