This is because in addition to being the most sold video game of all time, minecraft is effectively open source. It's not literally open source, but you can decompile java bytecode with standard tooling, and symbols are available, either community-reversed, or official.

Frustrating how game studios can see Minecraft's success here and not change a thing about their development practices.

I think Minecraft's position today has as much to do with the content of the game itself as it has to do with its architecture/Mojang's engineering choices.

The nearly-infinite expandability and modularity of Minecraft is partially due to the simplicity of the art, core game mechanics, and lack of storyline. Good mods are harder to make when the world they must integrate into is more complex.

I think this means a lot of games wouldn't see the kind of sustained success Minecraft has seen, even with more "open" development practices.

I hypothesize that the "open world" craze of years past was an attempt to capture Minecraft magic, but those games lacked the thematic open-endedness that really facilitates Minecraft's longevity.

There’s actually a very large and vibrant community for modding Unity games like this.

More competitive games can’t afford any type of easy reverse engineering due to the cheating factor.

Mods are the (amazing) end game for Lethal Company. So many fun, new tweaks and content.

For the curious: https://thunderstore.io/c/lethal-company/

Click on any mod, and you can see the decompiled source. The mods use function hooking to run before or after certain functions are called rather than the event based system you see in Minecraft plugins.

minetest is open source for real though

The four great game engines: Unreal, Unity, Minecraft and Godot.

I don’t think Minecraft is number four on the list. It might be number two.

Roblox is somewhere on that list too ....

How many thousand mods does it have?

Isn't each server its own mod, in effect?

Minetest is much more of a game engine.

I've heard from someone I know that played both extensively that minetest is less prone to losing everything for data corruption (never happened once in minetest, regularly in minecraft after a while. But sample size is 1).

I don't think I've ever witnessed data corruption in Minecraft, and that's even playing since Alpha 1.0.11 and multiple data format migrations... well, my sample size is 1, too.

I've also been on ZFS nearly the whole time. Are you certain Minecraft actually corrupted your data file, or do you suffer underlying hardware failure?

Is that sample size of one from the java edition or bedrock edition of minecraft?

java