They could still do all that on steam.
Comment on Mojang reveals The Sift as the first new Minecraft dimension in 14 years
mschae@discuss.mschae23.de 6 hours agoMinecraft in Steam would be a downgrade in every way (Minecraft already has no DRM, lets you freely download and play old versions, doesn’t require the official launcher to start, is easily modded, and so on).
GunValkyrie@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
rtxn@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
I don’t see how Steam would make any difference.
mschae@discuss.mschae23.de 4 hours ago
Yes, sure, but Steam encourages the use of the DRM included in the Steamworks API.
If Minecraft could only be downloaded through Steam, that would also be a step back insofar that right now, Mojang will let you download the game without any authentication at all. Changing this would be quite inconvenient for mod developers.
How? With branches / betas? There are a limit to those, and I’m pretty sure Minecraft exceeds them already. And as you already mentioned, you couldn’t use multiple versions at the same time. The only alternative (that I know of), the
download_depotmethod, is far from user-friendly.That would reduce the number of launchers required from 1 to… 1. 🙃
The workshop is integrated into Steam and can only be used there (can’t download the files manually, as far as I know). It’s also way too simple for the modding needs Minecraft has (with its multiple versions, dependencies or breakage between mods, modpacks…).
It would also require Mojang to write their own mod loader, which would likely be too limiting for most mod developers. (And Forge is not the only mod loader out there. There are far better ones, like Fabric.)
There’s just no point to doing this. You’d replace a system that works very well with one that doesn’t. Steam generally works pretty well for managing games, but I don’t believe there would be any improvement if Mojang were to switch to it for Minecraft.