Minecraft Reaches Beta Status, Price Goes Up

Eric writes "After over a year of development, Minecraft has hit Beta status today. Minecraft was developed for about a week before its public release on May 17, 2009. With the new milestone, the price of the game has increased to €14.95; when Minecraft moves beyond beta status, it will sell for €20.00. The beta is more focused on polish and content. The aim is to add proper modding support via a stable API, some kind of non-intrusive narrative to help drive the game experience early on, and a late-game goal. Updates will be less frequent, so as to make sure stability is maintained thanks to more extended testing. Despite this, there have already been two beta releases: client and server Beta 1.0 followed quickly by client 1.0_01."

Comments

The real question going through my mind is..

[Ventriloquate]

did they get their money back from PayPal?

Re:The real question going through my mind is..

[Ailure]

Yes, Notch got his money. :)

Releases.

[srothroc]

The summary fails to mention the spectacular fail.

The release that was supposed to inaugurate the beta also created a bunch of bugs for both single- and multi-player modes, including dupe bugs, which he was trying to fix.

The patch that followed the beta release was supposed to fix those bugs, and didn't. Minecraft remains almost unplayable for me in single- or multi-player mode; my friends can't even connect to the server anymore.

I understand that "beta" is just a milestone, but this is really inauspicious.

Re:Releases.

[Chyeld]

Except that's exactly how it's suppose to be.

Full daylight provides the maximum brightness of 15. Each value below this is 80% as bright as the one above it. For example, 14 is 80% as bright as sunlight, and 13 is 64% bright.

Torches emit light level 14 and monsters spawn at light level 7 or below. Light levels drop by one for every block away from the source. So if you aren't placing light sources about every 5 or so blocks, you will be working in the dark when the sun goes down/you go underground and you'll be always doing the Crazy Ivan to check for Creepers sneaking up on you.

Coal and wood aren't exactly rare, I've gone on simple 'camping' trips above ground and come back with two or more stacks of coal by the end of the day, and wood is even easier to collect. Your problem is you want your world to match your aesthetics rather than how the game was setup.

Preorder now!

[Kjella]

Minecraft Reaches Beta Status, Price Goes Up

If there's one thing I don't do, it's buy software that isn't written yet. Maybe under some limited conditions in custom software both otherwise, let me know when you're done and what you're charging for it and I'll consider it.

Re:Preorder now!

[srothroc]

It was written; you were paying for a product that existed at the time, with the bonus being unlimited future updates. Beta purchasers are not eligible for the unlimited future updates, unfortunately. A lot of people, me included, obviously thought that the game as it was in its nascent alpha stage was worth the 10-15 USD (depending on the exchange rate) being charged for it.

Re:Preorder now!

[Khyber]

No shit.

This man made BANK on a fucking ALPHA.

What the fuck? I can understand needing development capital, but still, charging for an Alpha?

Insanity. He just showed up Microsoft, Apple, Google, EVERYBODY, at their own goddamned game.

Re:Preorder now!

[TheThiefMaster]

Beta purchasers are not eligible for the unlimited future updates, unfortunately.

They are eligible for all updates up until the final release, and all bugfixes, though.

Re:Preorder now!

[Sockatume]

It's not like Notch twisted anybody's arm. Several hundred thousand people, myself included, enjoy the game enough in its current form to be willing to pay for it. And if that means it's cheaper and we get all the add-ons for free, all the better.

Re:Preorder now!

[Sockatume]

From a first-person perspective you place and remove blocks, which have various properties, to build things. Some of those blocks can be combined and refined to make:

* New kinds of blocks, like glass or stairs
* Tools, like pickaxes and torches
* Interactable objects like doors, vehicles and refining furnaces
* Sensors, switches, buttons and NOR gates, with which one can build everything from an automatic door to a turing-complete computer

The world you play in is procedurally generated from a seed and, depending on technical limitations, is several times the size of the surface of the earth, albeit only 128 metres deep. There is a day-night cycle, monsters can spawn wherever it is sufficiently dark (i.e. at night or in unlit caverns) and farm animals can spawn wherever it is sufficiently bright.

For example, I have built a monster-resistant house with a moat, and a system of water channels that funnels the creatures from the moat down to a contraption that kills them, at which point their loot is funnelled to a sensor that lights up a lamp upstairs to tell me to go fetch the goodies. I'm currently finishing off that system before I venture into a newly-discovered cave system to get some more iron ore with which to build some tracks for a railway system. On another part of the map, I am hollowing out a mountain to build a secure location in which to construct a portal to a parallel dimension of pure suffering.

Re:Preorder now!

[Aladrin]

I bought it thinking I would probably get my money's worth eventually. Instead, what I found was that I had 10 euros of fun in the first day, and the rest of the next couple weeks was pure bonus. I don't play it now, but I intend to play it again once there are actual goals... And I'll continue to reap value from that purchase.

I was a little sad to see that future purchases won't have the major updates included, but I did already tell all my friends about it, so it's their fault for missing it.

Re:Preorder now!

[Lumpy]

in other words... If you like the grinding in other games, you'll love minecraft as it is never ending grinding.

never ending....

I want the last 210 hours back..... Wait, I have to build more walls.... brb...

Re:Preorder now!

[Orne]

This was my gripe too, that minerals are so hard to find. But then I created a new world recently... it looks like the iron probability was increased a lot, but only shows up in new worlds, or when new map chunks are generated in old worlds.

Re:Preorder now!

[Jesus_666]

Actually, he essentially sold the full version of the game plus any upgrades he will ever release. You just happen to get access to all pre-release versions, as well. Essentially it's a discounted preorder that automatically enrolls you into the alpha/beta test. (Yes, he did actualy sell the alpha but you still got access to any subsequent release.)

Plus, this kind of model seems to be getting more common these days: You first have people preorder and then use their preorder money to actually develop the product. OpenPandora Ltd. is using the same approach to develop a handheld console - and they can't even deliver prerelease versions. Yet it works.

It's pretty interesting. Essentially you crowdsource for development capital; this allows startups and independent developers to take a shot at developing and releasing a product without having the required funds up front. Of course it puts the risk on the customer but it's interesting nonetheless.

Re:Preorder now!

[Pteraspidomorphi]

Yeah, in other words, Notch just wants to be able to have, in the future, a "Minecraft 2"-type expansion package and charge for it...

Poor programmer?

[gilleain]

Regardless of whether you blame Minecraft's success on luck or Notch's genius, he's a rather poor programmer. If you read through the release notes on his blog, he's apparently incapable of adding features without breaking lots of stuff on the way and waiting for him to fix basic functionality can take months.

I don't know if that's true or not, but I do know that programming 'under the spotlight' can be very distracting. What with twitter, blog comments, and forums there are far too many ways for the customer base to contact Notch 24/7. That's got to make fixing stuff hard if people are constantly shouting "FIX IT!" in your ear.

Re:Poor programmer?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty tired of the "unless you've done something better, shut up" argument. Why do I need to demonstrate I'm a super-star programmer before I can complain about a game that isn't fun? Or a best-selling musician before I can comment on how crappy certain songs are? If I call a film out as having really poorly-acted, is my opinion invalid because I'm not Ian McKellan?

If you have released something into the public eye, and it is flawed, then you know what? I'm going to say so. I'm not going to hold my mouth shut while thinking "well, I don't know how to fix his game-save corruption bug, so I guess it's none of my business", especially if I've paid for the damned thing. I'm going to say "Hey, what happened to my save? Fix it!" And likewise, if they make something great, then I'll say so too. If the programmer/musician/actor/whoever is worth their salt, they'll learn from the criticism, and graciously accept the praise.

Now, don't get me wrong; the AC above was being whiny, especially given the game's literally under 24 hours out of Alpha. But just tell them "Hey, you're being a whiny bitch, file a bug report and enjoy what works", not "Could I just see your programming credentials? Oh, Mr. Newell, I didn't know... I guess this means you were right all along."

Re:Poor programmer?

[MostAwesomeDude]

He is a terrible programmer.

He doesn't use Java NIO; instead, he uses threads. Wanna guess how many threads he spawns on startup? How about how many threads he spawns per connected player? (Answer: 12 and 4.)

His wire protocol and disk format are horrible. No delimiters, no seekability, no fixed packet sizes. He invented his own little standards and they are horrible. http://www.minecraft.net/docs/NBT.txt is the disk format; before that, he just serialized the Java classes directly to disk. (And to wire; one of the Alpha wire packets was just a chunk of the disk format!)

His grasp of GL is embarrassingly awful. He pridefully boasts GL 1.1 compatibility, but the fact is that he uses no features or extensions from GL 1.2 or later, including shaders, dynamic lighting, or vertex buffer objects. All of the drawing is done in slow display lists, and the lighting is done through a statically stored light map. (This might not set off alarm bells if you haven't done GL before. Trust me when I say that this is horribly slow.)

I wouldn't mind if it weren't for the fact that he has charged for alpha-quality software, as part of an open alpha test.

The alpha was well worth it

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought the alpha a few months ago, and while I haven't played it recently due to time contraints, it is easily well worth the money that is being charged. I played it far more than games that cost three times as much, not to mention that when playing it, I was never frustrated, or angry, but thoroughly enjoying the experience, which is something I can't say about most games, not to mention ones that aren't even freaking finished yet!

Couldn't it have a different name?

[Noughmad]

I mean, I just read Mi*****ft, and I think "Wow, Windows is finnaly in beta, but the price is even more up?".

Re:why would anyone want to play this?

[GospelHead821]

Yes, it is "that bad" although I don't really think it's fair to judge it in that manner. It's like playing with legos, scribbling in a sketch pad, singing to oneself, or writing poetry. Just a creative outlet for its own sake. So what if it's "just like a sandbox?" Nobody criticizes children for liking to play in a sandbox. It's fun and if it weren't so messy, I'm sure some adults would continue to do it. So why not create a game that allows for some of that sandbox experience?