2026-08-28 - 23:00
Mojang is the most over-hated game developer imo.
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The three big criticisms I see are:
Regarding performance, I just don’t think this is true. The game performs decently even on very old and underpowered hardware. I just tested 26.2 on an i3-4160T, with an Intel HD 4400 iGPU chip, and I got about 30-40 fps in stock Minecraft. After installing a few performance mods (just the ones I found after a search for “best performance mods Minecraft reddit”), it was sitting at a stable 60fps, with dips when loading chunks:
A few caveats, 1) this is on Linux, but if you are on a PC this old you really should be using Linux anyway for performance generally, and 2) It’s running at (roughly) 720p, but it’s Minecraft, does resolution matter that much?
Now should mods be needed? Probably not, but it performs okay without mods, and installing mods is so easy that I don’t really see the issue beyond a hypothetical/principle argument.
Regarding slow updates, I don’t follow Minecraft updates as much as I used to, I just check the wiki occasionally to see whats changed, but I feel like there have been a bunch of major additions in the last 1-2 years. New weapons (spear and the mace/flail), new equipment (copper tools), new biomes (the twilight zone forest one and the sulphur caves). Sure the 1.17/1.18/1.19 updates took a while and ended up spanning 3 major versions, but 1) it was COVID time, and 2) those were pretty big changes, compared to old updates (1.2-1.8 for example).
Also people compare Minecraft to Terraria in terms of updates, but 1) Terraria updates much more slowly than Minecraft, the 1.4.5 update feels took quite a while to come out (which is fine considering the studio size difference), and also Terraria is 2D, making development inherently a bit easier. Both teams seem really hard working but people only ever praise the Terraria devs, not Mojang.
The monetisation is really annoying but it’s only in Bedrock edition, and it’s for stuff that doesn’t really matter. It’s not really any different to what Bethesda does with the CC stuff, and people generally praise that as it allows some form of modding to be possible on console, which is normally completely off the table. Plus, considering what I found when testing the performance, anyone who owns a computer should be able to play Java edition, it’s not like you need a gaming PC.
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There are also a bunch of good things about Mojang/Minecraft that nobody really praises:
The fact I can log into, download, mod and play Minecraft, entirely through MultiMC, is great. Half the time you go to launch a game these days, you open it on Steam and then another program (EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar etc) pops up. Minecraft can be launched and run from FOSS software.
No other game does this in the way Minecraft does. Very few
games actually do it for one. Sure you can
download_depot in Steam to get old versions of
Fallout 4, and I think TModLoader allows old Terraria versions,
but with Minecraft it’s built into the launcher and fully
supported.
People complain about the mob votes, and I understand why, it’s a very “popularity contest” way of integrating community feedback, but it’s still far better than what most (non-indie) game developers do.