Everyone knows the tale of Brand X getting bought out by some faceless global conglomerate and going to shit, but does the opposite ever happen?
Gucci. It got bought out by PPR in the 90’s, they replaced everything but the name pretty much. Tom Ford’s work as the new head designer turned Gucci into the iconic modern luxury brand it is today.
(I only really know this as I was slightly obsessed with that House Of Gucci show with Lady Gaga in it. She’s a fantastic actress.)
I don’t think we should be too surprised by this. If a company isn’t all that good before a conglomerate buys it, then it’s unlikely to be widely known. Conversely, if a small company is widely known, it’s likely to be exceptionally good. So, even if acquisition usually just results in regression to the mean, we’ll still mostly have heard of ones that degraded the company.
Here’s my full list:
You forgot:
i don’t see what you did there
First thing that comes to mind is Lamborghini which would not exist today if it were not acquired. It was on the verge of bankruptcy and ended up getting passed around a few times before being acquired by Volkswagen/Audi. I think the general consensus is that access to Audi’s technology brought some sophistication in the form of AWD, traction and stability control, and a bump in quality and reliability. I know they only make obscenely expensive cars that few people ever get to enjoy, but they were able to maintain a headquarters and factory in Italy with a few thousand employees which would have definitely shut down without the acquisition.
Edit: On the topic of cars, another example would be Red Bull Racing which originated as a small F1 team started in the 90s. It was bought by Ford and rebranded to Jaguar F1. Ford didn’t have much success with it, so they sold the whole team to Red Bull for $1. Red Bull went on to dominate from 2010 to 2013 and again from 2021 to present day.
What was Red Bull racing originally called?
Stewart Grand Prix (Jackie Stewart’s old team), then Jaguar, then Red Bull racing (or a variation thereof).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Bull_Racing
Most teams have a longer list of previous names.
Cool, I didn’t realize teams got taken over in that way, I thought it was a whole new team.
It’s quite fun tracing some of them back - especially the frontrunners which grew put of backmarkers (though often you find the backmarkers were themselves frontrunners 20 years earlie)r.
For example, Tyrrell were world champions with Jackie Stewart in the 70s, but by the mid 1990s, they were pootling around at the back of the field with Ukyo Katayama.
Tyrrell became British American Racing, which became Honda Racing, which became Braun GP, which became Mercedes, who up until Red Bull’s current dominance, were doing pretty well :)
Yeah only Ferrari, McLaren and Williams are still driving under the name it was founded with. Haas could maybe also be counted but it was created by buying up the assets of Manor/Marussia after it collapsed, they technically didn’t buy the Marussia team. I’m not sure if it is a whole new team or if most people working for Marussia just got rehired by Haas.
It’s hard to start a new team from scratch, and there’s pretty much always some team that’s struggling at the back, so usually it’s done this way. Andretti is trying to start one from scratch tho.
IIRC Stewart Grand Prix and then Jaguar Squad. Not an F1 guy though so could definitely be wrong.
I was kinda hoping Microsoft would improve Activision.
Narrator: They won’t.
Someone’s an optimist.
I’m generally pro-Xbox but don’t consider myself a fanboy. I think the acquisition will be good for both brands.
I do worry about what they’ll do with the Blizzard IPs, but at this point I’m worried about Blizzard regardless.
Blizzard destroyed warcraft 3, quite possibly the greatest game ever made, with their “reforged” bullshit and I can never forgive them for that. I swore them off afterward. I am ashamed to say that I caved and bought Diablo 4 and was reminded what a shit company they are because they somehow managed to suck all the fun out of that too.
The bar to be an improvement is so obscenely low that it’s almost impossible for Microsoft not to be better.
Lol
Its still too soon, isnt it? Like regulators still havent OKd it and stuff yet.
Yeah I think they approved it and are now reexamining it once again.
Well they certainly can’t turn it into the worst gaming company because EA still exists.
I think Activision-Blizzard passed EA in badness years ago. Maybe Square Enix did too.
Like, when’s the last time there was an EA controversy beyond “game’s bad?” And even then I’ve only really heard sports games and Battlefield are bad.
I dunno, I still think EA has them beat on greed with microtransactions. The new launcher is absolutely littered with Battlefield 4 shortcut packs at full price (lol) and Sims stuff, hell I don’t even play The Sims. You’re not wrong about ActiBlizz though, I am pretty pissed at them for shutting down Overwatch and I don’t like OW2 so I don’t play it. But I’ve always felt like EA was trying to nickle and dime everyone to death more than any other company. And I absolutely hate what they’ve done with Respawn. But yeah, you make a good argument. They both suck.
Only if Bobby Kotick will be replaced by a real game developer and not a suit.
Supposedly, Kotick is out if Microsoft gets to take over. My assumption was that Microsoft won’t wanna keep running the IP into the ground right after acquiring it
It’s hard to believe that Microsoft is going to own World of Warcraft.
I look forward to fighting Clippy as a raid boss
I’ve not played wow since legion but I would come back for that
I’ve never played wow but might have to try if that happens
In the development world, Microsoft is actually doing some legitimately good work since the end of the Balmer years. Back then open source was a cancer that needed to be eliminated. Now they have VSCode (maybe the most popular IDE at the moment), develop and release Typescript under an open license, and own github (still a bit of a mixed bag but they’re trying).
The company I work for got bought out and from my perspective things have only improved. From the perspective of the random customer who has the first thing go wrong in half a decade though? Those immediately blame the acquisition.
Did they keep most employees on?
The only employee replaced was the owner, which I’m not sure that counts. Another one resigned a few months after, because they found a new job.
Cool :)
This is a pretty good example of a mental bias. Most of the times this happens it’s the expected result, so nobody bothers to remember.
Like I can’t remember one either. But there’s a lot of companies that have been rescued from disaster and turned back around into forgettable mediocrity. I just … can’t think of one.
Right? The tagline is always something like “new owner will give us the capitol we need to achieve ____ goal,” and that makes sense from a business standpoint, but every example I can think of involves the new owner just milking the brand until it collapses.
If you really want to find some, just go look through the holdings of some large holding companies. They didn’t make those, they bought them. I’m sure you can find some that were bought at bargain basement prices as more troubled assets and stabilized. Berkshire Hathaway might be a decent place to start.
Maybe medical? Like, Bio-Ntech designed the COVID vaccine, Pfizer bought it and could wrap up the phase 3 trials and then scale production?
So, they didn’t actually make the product better, but they probably made it viable sooner than if they hadn’t bought it?
But that is kind of the normal process for the medical industry at this point…start ups developing new medicine and then shopping it to Big Pharma for buyouts or funding
Pfizer did not buy BioNtech. They just got a production licence.
Oh interesting! I didn’t realize that. I work tangentially with pharma start ups and development and just assumed they were bought out. I’ve seen that happen enough times that it felt expected. Thanks for the clarification!
I don’t think Phizer did anything to make the vaccine better, just more available. Their size makes it possible to do things at larger scale. Phizer has pretty much given up on doing any R&D and now just buys up smaller innovative companies. They extract out any patents and other IP they want, and move on. I work in pharma, and everyone I know who’s worked for them in the past has a story about how Pfizer came in, bought their facility, then shut the doors within a couple years. Definitely didn’t make the lives of all those workers better, who had to uproot their families and find new jobs elsewhere.
YouTube got better before it got to whatever it is now
I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. Youtube only existed for less than 2 years as an independent start up. There’s no way to know what it could become as an independent tech company.
Certainly not rich enough to host the amount of content it does, or pay content creators what they get paid.
The original plan was a dating site with video profiles!
What could have been…instead we got tinder :/
There was a social media site called MySpace in the early 2000s that got bought out and my friend Tom made out great and is now a successful photographer. The website went to shit, but my first online friend is living his best life.
I don’t know how to quote, so here y’all go
“There was a social media site called MySpace“
I’ve never felt so old in my life.
MySpace actually just reverted back to it’s intended purpose which is for bands to post their stuff.
Didn’t the whole site shut down? IIRC, everyone who had a MySpace page lost it a few years ago.
Both halves of that comment are incorrect. It wasn’t originally for posting music, it was an improvement of the concept of social networking that started as an alternative to Friendster.
The music stuff didn’t come until years later, and they never had anything you could consider a success in that department, especially after they deleted every song artists had previously posted to the site.
Also, just going in the website right now, that’s not the bands posting those articles. That’s not even people posting news on MySpace. It is literally just aggregating music news from other websites.
Its true intended purpose was online file storage, a full 300MB for free, which was gigantic at the time.
I had an account there before it died, then Tom bought the domain and made it a social network.
Matt Stone and Trey Parker bought the real Casa Bonita and improved everything all around; from the decor and atmosphere, the food and drinks, and pays the staff, IIRC, $32/hour.
It’s not a big conglomerate, but it’s the closest example I could even think of.
As a Coloradian I’m so ducking happy to see what they’ve done. There was huge issues with the old place and it literally made you sick. Now they have a big time chef and new kitchens
I went there before they bought the place and it was so gross haha. I swear the margaritas were 50% salt and food was microwaved at best. Everyone hyped it up so much and it was just sad. I’ll give it another go if I’m ever in the area again.
Did they change the shows? I remember they had a guy five off the waterfall but that was about it
They kept a lot of the shows. I don’t know which ones stayed since it’s a lotto system to get in and we’ve been on the list since May.
Did they change the shows? I remember they had a guy five off the waterfall but that was about it
Consider yourself lucky. I had to drive all the way to Tijuana for the opportunity to see a guy five off a waterfall show.
That just seems like changing owners.
What is the difference, in your mind, between changing owners and buying out a company?
To me they’re the same thing and this is an appropriate reply for OP. Is it just a matter of scale for you? (I think we’d all like bigger examples, but this still works)
I definitely think the original post meant things like retail stores, social media platforms, nationwide chain restaurants, etc
Sure, but that was just additional context for my question, which was what this poster feels is the difference between changing owners and buying out a company.
They’re thinking of changing owners vs buying a corporate company with a CEO. Yeah they’re similar lol but not really what the post is asking for on here
Again with the fixation on the OP. Let me be more direct: I didn’t ask you.
I think the term the OP used was “faceless conglomorate”.
I heard Matt Stone’s face was ripped off by Scuzzlebutt, and Trey Parker was conglomerated into a dawson’s creek trapper keeper, so seems like a fair answer to me.
The context provided in the question is of big companies buying smaller companies and ruining them. OP asked if “the opposite ever happens”, which I interpret to mean a big corporation buying a smaller company and it NOT going to shit.
Sure we can talk about any change in ownership whatsoever, but that seems like a complete change in topic with an obvious answer.
The two combined have about 1.2 billion, which is surely more than the old owners of Casa Bonita.
None that I can think of.
And honestly Brand X is rarely the good guy in this situation being fucked over by the big bad corporations.
It is usually the creator/owner is looking for their payday. They may have created a great product but these days that is usually to make them attractive to be bought out.
In tech, for the last few decades, the goal of so many startups is not to be the next Apple/Google/Facebook but to create something that Apple/Google/Facebook want to buy.
In tech, for the last few decades, the goal of so many startups is not to be the next Apple/Google/Facebook but to create something that Apple/Google/Facebook want to buy.
Yeah unfortunately not taking a buy out often means one of the Big Five making their own version of whatever you’re doing / buying out your competitor, and then bullying you out of the market. A bleak possibility for start ups
Good point. I am not knocking the decision to sellout. Just noting that for some it is the goal and for others, as you noted, it is the least worst option.
Not an apple fan really at all but buying that chip design company way back when seems to have been the right move. The M1 chip in my mbp is fantastic.
It has some dumb problems though. Lack of dual monitor support and virtualization issues are painful for my users.
I can confirm that dual monitors do work on my M2 Max, with the laptop’s own screen I’m at three. I use this setup everyday, no issues.
Ive been running 2 1440p monitors off a M1 Mini since it’s launch, one over HDMI and one over DisplayPort via USB C… What’re you talking about?
Is the lack of dual monitor support only for the M1? I have an M1 Pro MBP for a work computer and it works fine with two monitors + the laptop screen
Yeah, it’s only the original M1
Those have both been solved though, right?
I’ve seen Apple promotions with multiple monitors. I also remember them showing a virtualization thing in a keynote and there are still many app for running VMs. There is the ARM vs x86 issue, but from what I’ve read Rosetta handles it pretty well, an it should only be a matter of time before more operating systems and software adopt ARM. Windows has been dabbling in it for years, I’m not sure what’s taking them so long to commit to making it a normal release.
Windows 11 has 64bit ARM support with emulation for 64bit x86 apps, Windows 10 only does 32bit afaik.
They can’t take the same step as Apple of just killing off x86 because they don’t control all aspects of the devices like Apple does
Not saying I like the forceful move to ARM, I’m honestly not sure how worth it it will be in the long run, but who knows.
I’m not saying Windows needs to be ARM only, but it should at least have parity with x86. Last I saw you couldn’t just go buy the ARM version of Windows, it’s a Windows Insider preview thing. Even better would be to just buy Windows, then it checks your CPU and installs for the correct architecture.
For 3rd party developers, I’d expect Microsoft would be pushing hard for universal binaries, similar to how Apple does, so when people download an app it can run natively on x86 or ARM. Microsoft has released a couple ARM based Surface devices, but they never seemed like a good option, because of the limitations around 3rd party software.
In the long run I think it has to happen, unless Intel does something really impressive. ARM has caught up in terms of performance and its performance per watt is better. I went to a talk from a guy who ran a the high performance computing lab at a university near me several years ago, and he said it was just a matter of time before labs like his moved to ARM, as they would be able to get better performance at a much lower overall cost. On the consumer side, this should mean better battery life and better mobile devices. The battery life Apple is able to get on their new chips is pretty incredible.
They 100% have been selling ARM windows machines for years now, they just suck in comparison to x86
They did push for universal binaries, but no devs wanted to make the switch, I actually appreciate that Windows didn’t bork all prior applications unilaterally like Apple does with most of their OS releases (I work for a company that has a program with Linux/windows/macOS and I swear every single major macOS update breaks shit and Apple doesn’t give a fuck)
I don’t see the performance being comparable yet, at least in my experience the power of ARM is much more in its energy efficiency, it simply does not compete in actual real world power (at least yet)
Ultimately I think it comes down more to Apple vs Windows approaches, Apple controls every aspect of every official device running macOS, windows is much more free form with so many manufacturers and different configurations being possible.
I would never willingly purchase an Apple device for that reason, but I also like Linux, just too much of a gamer to constantly want to worry about compatability.
ARM Windows devices have been getting sold, but if you build your own ARM system, or buy an ARM system with no OS, you can’t just order a copy of Windows for it on Amazon. It makes it feel like it is very much still a beta product and those buying the ARM Windows systems are the guinea pigs.
Developers rarely listen to Microsoft when something is asked for. Microsoft has shown time and time again that their bark has no bite, so developers don’t waste their time. It’s why UWP failed and countless other things. Apple may create a lot of work for developers to keep up with wherever they’re doing, but at least the devs know if Apple says to do something, they mean it, and it doesn’t feel like a complete waste of time at the end of the day.
Can you not just install Windows 11 normally on an ARM processor? I would think it’d be included with a normal installer but idk for sure, do people even build custom ARM rigs?
Its sort of a give and take though still, you can’t really build a hackintosh without very specific parts so… The fact there is no “macOS for ARM” copy available at all makes the point somewhat moot no?
UWP still exists, Microsoft is like the only one still developing them though, there are a few others but it’s definitely not a focus for any devs outside of Microsoft that I’ve seen.
Though I do agree that Apple generally sticks to their decisions whether for better or for worse :p
Even before that, Apple owes its very existence to an acquisition. Acquiring Next allowed them to abandon their dying OS and start anew with OS X, and brought back in founder Steve Jobs (who Apple had previously fired). With Steve Jobs at the helm, they made the computers cool again to buy some time before the iPod completely turned the company around.
It was almost like NeXT was acquiring Apple for their branding, with the way it turned out.
A similar thing happened with Pixar/Disney, where post acquisition Disney Animation Studios started to work a lot more like Pixar. Interestingly, Steve Jobs was also CEO and majority shareholder at Pixar up until that acquisition.
I bet with AppleTV+ Apple is wishing Jobs integrated Pixar into Apple instead of selling to Disney.
Nah, that would’ve spread the company too thin. Apple needed that laser-focus approach they had in the iPhone days, else they’d be dead.
An incredibly rare example of ‘I won’t buy it unless you pay me to’ actually working out in real life.
Appalachian Mountain Brewery.
They paved the way for new breweries in a little mountain town in western North Carolina. They consistently gave significant percentages to charities, often local. They built a recognized brand and then sold to Anheuser Busch InBev. AB InBev helped them reach new craft beer drinkers with a huge corporate backing. The business ran the same as far as a local consumer could tell. They got a lot of new insight and opportunities.
And then two of the original founders bought it back from AB InBev. First time that’s ever happened. Really great guys too. Very happy to continue to see their journey.
The beer bust is happening. Craft beer isn’t the darling it money maker it was a decade ago.
Sounds like this brewery navigated this well and sold high and bought low, but the amount of breweries closing by me is crazy
Where do you live? I’m in Oregon and we probably have 40 breweries in my midsized city. I’m wondering if its just a matter of market saturation where only the strong survive. Funnily enough, I’m currently in Kona, Hawaii on vacation and bought some Kona Brewing Co. beer. Turns out it was brewed and bottled in Portland, Oregon.
OTOH, I find that IPAs are super 'effin saturated and not that great after drinking them over the years. It seems like every brewer wants to jump into IPAs even though you already have 47 choices at every convenience store in the country.
I’m in Portland. I feel like a brewery closes every month or so.
I mean: Burnside, Royale, Laurelwood, Grains of Wrath, brewery 26, Hair of the Dog, Pono, Modern Times, Sasquatch, Portland Brewing… those are the ones I can think of off hand
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AB InBev does some great stuff with their craft owners. If it made sense for them to buy it back that’s awesome, but their mantra around craft really is: “you’ve got success, we’re just going to give you more tools”. A lot of the big folks like Duvall operate that way and you wind up with regional breweries shipping kegs around the world.
That sounds a lot like Chipotle. Sold to McDonalds, exploded in popularity, and bought themselves back.
Now it’s time they sold it back. Those fuckers won’t let me order my precious queserito anymore :(
Minecraft maybe? I would say at the minimum it’s a net neutral but considering how far off the deep end Notch is now I imagine it was a good thing.
I’m not familiar with the detail of that one - was he always a lunatic, or did that come with the money following the buyout?
He always was a weirdo.
Yup. Comes with the nationality.
Source: am Norwegian
That is what I call untrustworthy source, to much conflict of interest.
I don’t know if it is better than when notch was in charge, but certainly they have updated it more frequently and have taken good care of it, true.
I think it was at its best once Jeb started to take the reins. Notch wasn’t really good at adding features that were actually fun to play with. I liked that they were willing to take risks but that quickly soured as it pairs extremely poorly with their excessive traditionalism. It took like 5 years for them to undo the disastrous combat changes when it became quickly apparent that they sucked, and the hunger/sprinting mechanics are still a pure cancer to the experience to this day. I want to see them make big sweeping changes like in the earlier days while also not being afraid to dial it back or try again if it ends up not being fun.
They’ve made some pretty awful changes to the game since. That being said, I bet minecraft would have fizzled out if microsoft didn’t purchase them. They’re still pumping out regular updates and its popularity is huge. I’d definitely consider the acquisition an overall win.
What awful changes
The game has overall become way too easy. 1.14 villagers completely broke gameplay making trading and building iron farms way too boring. The pre-1.14 mechanics were way more balanced and fun. Raid farms are just way too powerful especially with the nerf to natural spawning that 1.18 brought making witch farms basically unusable. Loads of features like that which just made things too easy. It feels like you’re rewarded too much for very little effort.
Chat reports and microsoft migration are also really controversial, of course.
Not to say that they haven’t made lots of positive changes but that’s my main gripe with the development over the past few years.
I think it’s only easy if you know all the tricks for farming and whatnot, normal players wouldn’t likely say it’s too easy necessarily, I also didn’t notice any big change between 1.13 and 1.14 unless you mean the light level thing?
People will always find a way to break the system, and for longtime Minecraft players, it’s nice not having to do all gathering by hand, instead being able to use your knowledge to create a ridiculous farm is… Cool imo.
To be honest though, I can’t really get into vanilla in general, I’m always playing modded if I’m playing myself, tho I watch vanilla players like Hermitcraft
I also didn’t notice any big change between 1.13 and 1.14 unless you mean the light level thing?
They entirely overhauled villager trading making it a game of just placing and breaking workstations to get the trades you want. The pre-1.14 mechanics were a lot better and more rewarding imo. Iron golem spawning was also totally overhauled and they’re just too dead simple these days. You can build a 900 ingot per hour farm in about 10 minutes or less.
People will always find a way to break the system, and for longtime Minecraft players, it’s nice not having to do all gathering by hand, instead being able to use your knowledge to create a ridiculous farm is… Cool imo.
I love farming, I’m a technical player so that’s my main focus. I’m saying that the recent changes have really diminished the skill and fun in creating certain farms. Like how portal based farms have been the new meta for basically everything. Just changing it so mobs have a cooldown period after spawning before they can go through portals would be a massive nerf and force people to actually develop cooler farm concepts.
But you’re a different kind of player then the “target” for these kinds of changes right? Think about kids playing Minecraft, you think they’re generally going to be setting up massive raid farms, shulker farms, etc? Probably not, they’d be playing it more “as expected”, which isn’t really “easy” unless you know the cheese farms you can build.
Same kind of thing with storage, there’s tons of storage systems out there that you can use, but majority don’t know about it unless they go out and find the information online.
What’s great about minecraft is that it can be enjoyed by kids but there’s a lot of depth to what you can do as well. No one complained that it was too difficult to make iron farms before the changes. Also kids likely aren’t farming thousands of obsidian blocks to make portal based farms either. There’s a balance that can be made.
Accidental delete.
Like forcing everyone over to a microsoft account, which will sneakily force you to hand over your phone number for verification for “suspicious activity” ~1 week after registration, no matter what you do or don’t do.
There was also something about channeling all server chat messages to a central filtering team/system, and irreversibly banning anyone who said something that’s not “child safe”, even if it was just on a private server where the measure was not turned off
I guess the Microsoft account thing I don’t really get, it wasn’t difficult to move it over in my experience but I already had several Microsoft accounts for Windows and Xbox stuff
Idk about the filtering thing, i definitely don’t like it in theory but also haven’t seen anyone actually banned/muted due to it, definitely doesn’t make sense that it’s enabled by default on private servers, should have been a realms only thing, then again a majority of servers with most of the population likely aren’t on realms
I guess the Microsoft account thing I don’t really get, it wasn’t difficult to move it over in my experience but I already had several Microsoft accounts for Windows and Xbox stuff
For new MS accounts they now require a phone number. Not at registration, but in a week after it.
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I’d say it’s probably the sale of Minecraft that sent Notch off the deep end. I read some articles and it seemed like he was having a hard time. Loss of purpose (Minecraft), loss of friends when the very public wealth changed the relationship, and an inability to really fit in with the rich and famous who he shares little in common with. It talked about him throwing parties and basically still being alone while everyone partied around him. When you seemingly have everything and are still alone and depressed, that’s a dark place. A lot of people lash out in weird ways in that situation. Look at Jim Carey or listen to the commencement speech he did.
If I had to pin an exact date on it, it’d be when he bought the most expensive mansion in Beverly Hills (at the time, $70M was a lot for a mansion).
Why? Because you need to deal with life changes one thing at a time. Pro-tip for the future billionaires currently scrolling this comment section: don’t move away from your friends, family, and home country immediately after getting rich – it might screw with your head a little bit. Do what the old money does: stay grounded, dress down, and pretend to be normal.
pretend to be normal
Me, penniless: Yep, I’m so normal *nervous laughter*
Quite the rolemodel, I’d say! You make it look easy
Living, as I do, in a town where I don’t know very many people, I would move back to my hometown to be with my old friends if I got rich. I think that’s the way to do it.
Stuff like this is why old money laughs at new money.
Of course, if Notch doesn’t have kids, what’s he holding on to it for…
Far be it from me to demand frugality from a billionaire. It would have been wiser to waste money without simultaneously scoring an “own goal” on his mental health, though…
No one is really ready to get a check for $2.5B.
That $70M house was 2.8% of his payout from Microsoft. That would be like someone with $10M buying a $280,000 house. The house wasn’t that crazy of a purchase in terms of price, but didn’t do anything to help give him ties to a community, which is probably what he really needed. Maybe he thought it would get him into the Hollywood community, but he was a fish out of water.
There were hints that he was already on that path and realized that if he didn’t get off when he did, he would have taken his game down too.
Yeah - he decided he wanted a billion dollars more than he wanted his friends. All he had to do was share.
He may have been worried he’d find out they weren’t actually friends, but just co-workers. They take off doing whatever and he’s left in the same spot, just with a lot less money and feeling used on top of it all. He took the sure thing instead of the gamble.
I’ve had co-workers tell me if they won the lotto they would share it with me and some others. When they left the company, I never heard from them again. We weren’t real friends, we just spent 40 hours per week together and made the best of it. If this was the case with Notch’s friends at Minecraft, then they either leave, or they stick around under some sense of obligation. That would still change the relationship and could lead to some resentment.
If you have to share your money for your friends to stick around you, they’re not really friends.
In addition to suddenly being a billionaire, I’m sure life in the public eye didn’t help his situation at all, especially to someone who I imagine spends/spent a lot of time online reading comments from armchair psychologists speaking about him.
Look, if someone wants to give me a billion dollars I will prove that it doesn’t turn you into a Nazi unless you’re already secretly a Nazi.
It’s more complicated then that, but still fair to say
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I think the development was reinvigorated when microsoft joined the team here.
Oh yeah, extreme censorship, shitty mob votes, and a DLC marketplace. So reinvigorated.
The censorship is kind of rediculous, tbh I thought that was in before Microsoft. Don’t see the rest as negative, and development seems more stable in the new groove, with regular larger updates. Couldn’t vote on mobs at all before, and there is DLC for Minecraft??
All editions have DLC except Java. Many free Java features are paid in other versions. The problem with the mob vote is that they could totally just add all 3, but don’t.
The whole ‘censorship’ narrative was a nazi psy-op. I literally didn’t even hear about it because I blocked all the mientubers for unrelated issues, and the one guy who did eventually tip me off its existence was essentially parroting talking points straight from that guy who I blocked after I caught him trying to groom his majority child audience that what Notch said on twitter was OK and he was being cancelled.
Like obviously I don’t trust macroshaft to do any chat moderation since they seem to think cracker is a deeply offensive racial slur but ret–d is just harmless banter, but when literally everyone making a stink about it is either an outright nazi propagandist or has close ties to one, it’s hard not to see what’s going on.
I’m generally libleft and I’m quite upset about it. I bought the game. I own the game. They shouldn’t be allowed to take it away from me. What if you were gay and a car bricked itself because the manufacturer didn’t approve of you frequenting a gay bar?
The most concerning thing to me is the fact that they can ban users from playing on their own servers. Moderation should be on the server owners imo. Microsoft being able to ban someone from their own server that they self host or pay to host via a third party is a big issue.
That being said, I don’t think that Microsoft’s moderation has been as apocalyptic as a lot of people made it out to be. It’s just the principle that I take some issue with.
Just set the server to offline mode…
That’s a security risk because users can log in as other users. Regardless, if you paid for the game, you should be able to play on third party multiplayer servers.
True on the risk aspect, there are authentication plugins you can get instead on the server side.
On the ban aspect, I don’t see people making this claim for Steam, if you get banned on Steam you lose all your games, not just a $30 purchase, and maybe don’t call people slurs in online text chat? Idk, it seems like it was just an overhyped concern with few actually getting banned that didn’t deserve it somewhat.
