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Many followers of Mojang's (now Microsoft's) Minecraft have often wondered where Minecraft was going to be heading. The popular sandbox indie game that took the world by surprise back in 2009 when Swedish programmer and designer, Markus "Notch" Persson took effect the first ever alpha beta for Minecraft. Throughout the course of the next five years, the game that the entire world fell in love with on PC made its way to consoles. Minecraft has certainly been one of the best choices for games for people of any age to enjoy creating a virtual world in "creative mode" or simply surviving on the quest to slay the Ender Dragon and finding diamonds. However, the $2.5 billion deal that was revealed last month in where Microsoft acquired Swedish company, Mojang and gave all of Mojang's creations to Microsoft including Minecraft has had its doubts from the gaming community. Let's all wish the best for the new owners especially the ideas they have planned for us in the near future.

One of the most controversial views many gamers have now-a-days when a company is acquired by another company are typically described as negative due to the numerous changes when a big company purchases a relatively small company. Some deals actually end up as a success for both consumers and developers, however, many times it often backfires and ends up failing on one of the sides. Not all deals have to be purposed solely on gaming, examples such as the Youtube acquisition by Google back in 2006 has had many people frustrated with Google with all of the add-ons Google introduced over the years. Another example that many gamers seem to find more of a negative than a positive is when Electronic Arts (EA) purchased Digital Illusions CE (DICE) and the Battlefield franchise had a new owner around the same time Google purchased Youtube. The "big" company decides to do many major changes to the final product and usually ends up given a negative feedback the fan base with the new changes as opposed to the same design everyone is used to. In this case it seems that Microsoft has not unveiled further plans to redevelop major parts of the game, yet. When asked about the possibility for another sequel to the sandbox game, Head of Xbox Phil Spencer replied stating,
"I don't know if Minecraft 2, if that's the thing that makes the most sense. The community around Minecraft is as strong as any community out there. We need to meet the needs and the desires of what the community has before we get permission to go off and do something else," he said. "It doesn't mean that everything we're going to do is going to map to 100 percent of their acceptance, because I don't know if there is any topic where 100 percent of people agree. But we look at Job 1 is to go out and meet the needs of the Minecraft community first, and then we can think about ways that we can actually help grow it. That's our sole focus."
Of course maybe all changes in the future sound beneficial to the current stage of Minecraft. Spencer also gave more information pertaining to the cancellation of Minecraft on Microsoft's competitor, Sony, and stated they no plans to make it exclusive to Xbox and will continue to be published on Sony consoles. However, many have speculated that some minor changes will come exclusively to the Xbox as opposed to Sony console owners, the only example that comes to mind is the partnership with Microsoft and Activition's Call of Duty where certain downloadable content was available a month earlier on the Xbox servers than on PlayStation. Another attractive topic that Spencer touched on was the access to mods in different platforms stating,
"If I'm on PC I get access to the mod servers; if I'm on console or the mobile editions, I don't. We're looking at how do we bring that whole system together a little more. Because there are other games out there that let me move from screen to screen fairly seamlessly."
I think it's safe to say that many players, myself included, have often wanted to enable certain mods to give a certain player special privileges in order to make the game-play more enjoyable. The more variety of choices the players have, will definitely praise Microsoft for their work, however, it's still in its alpha stages and players should not be expecting the new feature for another couple of months.

I feel that if Microsoft was to publish a Minecraft 2, it would be the beginning of the end for the franchise. Minecraft is one of those rare titles that would be extremely weird to have a sequel. The game started off as a one time deal and should end with only one title, there is no point in making a sequel if there is no valid storyline to it. Sure, the defeat of the Ender Dragon is the closest to a real storyline, but it's not worthy of a sequel. Making monthly updates to the game is enough, new traps, new items, new mobs, and perhaps more bosses to the world of Minecraft should be taking effect, but definitely not a sequel.

Tell me Se7ensinners, will a sequel to award winning sandbox game be appealing to you and is Microsoft heading down the right path in order to make expand Minecraft bigger than before?

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