[sukuriant]

What about Minecraft's distribution method makes you not want to use it? You buy the game and are given an account, then you can use that account anywhere and everywhere on any operating system. You just log in when you start the game.

[eropple]

...except when the authentication server (which is also the website, because separation of concerns is for suckers!) is down because the entire company has taken a trans-Atlantic flight to go bask in the adulation of their fans, without so much as a single backup plan. Like they did earlier this year.

Last week, though--last week, they learned! They left one guy behind to deal with any problems that occurred. Of course, that one guy, whose entire capability to fix problems was "bounce the server", spent seven hours in a pub getting plastered while their authentication server was down again. True to form, they treated it as "lulz" instead of taking some responsibility for the screw-up.

So I can't blame people for wanting to stick to Steam. They at least have those "IT people" for fixing problems.

[rwolf]

When the authentication server went down my second week of trying out Minecraft, my copy kept working (with a dialog on startup letting me know that auth had failed).

I agree that it is embarrassing for a company demoing at a conference to have a protracted outage on their website, but the impact on current users should have been nil.

Have they made the DRM stickier since I last played?

[eropple]

You can't play online if the auth server is down, IIRC, unless you're playing on a server that doesn't authenticate. Which is kind of a problem.

[rwolf]

Ah, I was mostly a "putter in the corner by myself" kind of minecrafter, so I never tried multiplayer. I agree that that is a problem, yikes!