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Comment by calinet6 | Hacker News Reader

It could have succeeded without being in Java... it's the game's design and concepts that make it successful. Though to be fair, it helps make multiplatform availability easier.

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There are some basic C++ and C# Minecraft clients that people made for fun, but the real benefit of Java is how mod-able it is. There's actually a lot of tools for taking apart the minecraft.jar and putting it back together with new features.

I don't disagree... it was merely an observation. The largest-selling game currently available just happens to run on desktop Java... and the consensus I see recently around here is that Desktop Java is dead -- I like to point out that millions of homes are actively using it, even if only to play a game that really isn't dependent on what one would typically think of when they think 'desktop Java'.

Probably a few users of Eclipse out there, as well.

It's not the largest selling game, but might be the largest selling non-AAA, non-casual, PC-game of recent years.

With the amount of money that enterprise has invested in Java, it'll probably follow a similar trajectory to COBOL where "dead" isn't really dead.

I think one of the major points that sold the game is that there is (was?) a stripped-down demo of the game that ran right there on the page.

Not sure whether you want to buy? Just press that button there...

And yet had it not been Java you would have said that it could never have succeeded in Java. Somebody is butt hurt.

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