Many years ago, I managed to convince my dad to buy me the video game Minecraft. It ended up being a "shared" account between me and my sister, but I spent the most time playing. My sister recently wanted to start a Minecraft server with her friends, so I thought I could set one up using the machine this website is running on. It had been a while since either of us had played the game, so when I tried to turn it on on the family computer, I had to "Join the Microsoft Family!" with a Microsoft Account to keep playing.
Immediately, it takes me to this terrible website and it was trying to force me to make an account. Foolishly, I decided to go along with the website's plans, and just after I had finished making a microsoft account, it told me, "There was a problem." Gee, thanks.
"Okay, whatever," I thought, but then when I started up the game again, it told me I could play the Demo. What? I have already owned the game for close to a decade, it's downloaded onto my computer, but I can't run it because now Microsoft suddenly has a problem? I looked it up, and apparently this is a common thing. Mojang even talked about it on their Twitter page, although they sort of phrased it as if it wasn't their fault. Anyways, in the process, I got a nice glimpse of the Microsoft "family" of products, and I couldn't help feeling disgusted. They were selling this tracking app that stalks your kids for $10 a month, they were talking about making minecraft safer by integrating it with Xbox and policing what you say, and some other things so bad I don't even want to say it.
Look, I bought Minecraft before Microsoft bought Minecraft. Why do I have to regularly interact with this company just to play the game? I'm running a Minecraft server on my hardware with clients that are also my hardware, not even running windows. I don't want a Microsoft account. I don't want an Xbox Gamer Tag. I wonder if any of these workers at Big Tech companies ever take a look at themselves and think, "Hmm... Maybe I shouldn't ruin the lives of millions of children by shoving DRM down their throats." I sure hope that the money was worth it.
Anyways, I eventually solved the problem by performing some magic rituals, but I can't imagine that the parents of many young kids who are just getting into this game would be willing to do all that. I imagine that a few of them even paid $30 to buy a game that they already own. People always complain about how hard it is to use GNU/Linux, but I swear, It's soooo much worse with everything else. Everytime I have to interact with proprietary software, it's the same story of them making their products horrible through some half-hearted attempt to control their users. It's so bad, I can't go back to using things like Windows, even if I wanted to. Why are you still using Microsoft/Apple/Google/Amazon/proprietary anything in the current year?
P.S. This server's CPU sucks so I had to host the Minecraft server somewhere else.
If you want to play Minecraft, join the server
servers closed