Microsoft does not have the ability to stop you from running a Minecraft server. They can block you from using their authentication server, but all you have to do is edit a setting to false and then even people with pirated copies can join the server.
This thread title is inaccurate and misleading to people to unfamiliar with how Minecraft hosting works. Microsoft can’t shut down a private server. Even the OOP themself doesn’t phrase it that way in any of their posts about it.
Microsoft can’t take down their server. What they can do is ban it from connecting to their services. You do not need to connect to Microsoft to play on or host a private Minecraft server.
Everything being said on both sides in those screenshots doesn’t really mean much to me without data to show it’s actually the case.
My personal feeling is that I don’t care to own most games in the first place and would be happy getting them all from the library the same way I do with books. Without Gamepass I wouldn’t have played things like Payday 3 or Grounded in the first place because I won’t purchase them. The alternative for me is piracy.
“devs too focused on making a game pretty instead of fun” is talking about making the art photorealistic with fancy hair engines and such, when doing so doesn’t add meaningfully to the experience and only serves to needlessly complicate development and inflate the cost.
We can tell that making all these 3D models and animations is a problem for the devs because they’ve said so repeatedly. They’ve even said they can’t have every Pokemon in the same game as a result. Instead of the lovely pixel art of FRLG we have a mish-mash of dead-eyed, poorly-animated cartoons with PSP-quality “realistic” terrain that grate against each other. And for what? Why do 3D when you can only do 3D so poorly?