[shaftway]

I maintain that the majority of games are still disposable, despite the occasional subscription model or long-lived hit that pops up. Remember that most games aren't made by AAA studios.

Wasn't Minecraft completely rewritten from scratch in Java after a few years?

And the EA one, like you said, it's just model updates. Very few gameplay mechanics get more than a simple tweak. Just recompile with the new models. You don't need unit tests if the code never changes.

[cobalt]

the original minecraft is in java, it's probably gone through a lot of code transformation. The version you're thinking of is the microsoft version, rewritten in c++

[sfn42]

I thought the MS version was C#?

[mark38848]

I think Minecraft was originally written in Java and rewritten in a good programming language (i.e. not Java).

[grumpyprole]

Whether or not one thinks C++ is a "good" language, I always thought that (original) Minecraft busted the myth that blockbuster games had to be written in C++.

[CuriousSkeptic]

Being written in Java was probably instrumental in enabling the huge modding community around Minecraft. Which in turn was probably in large part responsible for its success.

[mike_hearn]

And more to the point for this thread, writing it in Java let Notch build and iterate extremely quickly. Minecraft originally came out of a 24 hour game writing competition in which most competitors were using C++, but Notch always used Java because coding speed was the most critical thing in that context.

[neonsunset]

It should have been written in C#, instead, the developers had to resort to silly optimization tricks that often never transpired.