It takes a very specific mindset to enjoy. I think "creatives" to put it broadly find it a lot more appealing than others. I spent hundreds of hours on a server where myself and others built huge structures jutting out of mountains, spanning impossible distance, that served no purpose at all. The fun was gleamed from the fact that building that sort of monumental stuff was a challenge. You needed to mine for resources to create all the materials you needed. You want this entire terrace to be made of glass well you have to get a bunch of sand and shove it into your rows of ovens for which you need to keep getting coal. Moving around on the skeleton of a "building" way up in the air was sort of nerve-wrecking and vertigo inducing.

You needed to be able to enjoy the process of simply creating without clearly defined goals or milestones.

Minecraft is as much a "kid's game" as lego is a "kid's toy" - or indeed as computer games are "for kids".

Also, what the person above me said ^^

Well @humanity said what I was going to say.

I will stick with Java - I play with too many mods to ever leave that version. If the Win10 version is cross-platform with Xbox Live, definitely think about getting it as well, friends playing on 360/One and I just cant get into playing with a controller .

It's pretty much the new Angry Birds/Farmville at this point, tons of non-gamers and casuals playing it.
That's why MS wants to monetize on the PC version so direly, they gonna make it impossible/very complicated for free mods and rake in the fat money selling skin packs for 2€ a piece, like it's already happening with the pocket and console editions.

A "native" version of Minecraft was absolutely inevitable after the purchase. Java was so damn irritating and it lead to some of the worst performance losses on my machines. I remember the game losing its shit repeatedly as we built some of our larger projects on the Vergecraft server. Losing the mod support is going to suck so I know people will be sticking to the Java version for that specifically. That said, I might be okay with losing mod support if the game runs substantially better.

As for the appeal: playing Minecraft with a big group of friends on a server is a better and more fun experience than any MMO ever created.

@humanity said:

I love the idea of Minecraft, and specifically the kind of creativity you describe, but I just can't get past the art style. I've also never actually tried it, though, so I might buy into the Windows 10 version for a tenner and see what the fuss is all about.

Controller support with the console interface when you enable it is a nice feature for PC players who want to kick back now and then.

This windows 10 version will play well with pocket edition, which you still CANNOT get on a windows phone. Thanks, Microsoft.

@benjo_t: if it's mirroring java content I doubt i'd ever go back to the java version to play unmodded unless I wanted to try out a snapshot build.

I really hope it gets ported to C++, those chunk load patterns are ridiculous for 2015.

No snark intended, but did you ever play with Lego when you were young? That's pretty much how I describe MC to someone who doesn't know what it is. Lego, with infinite blocks. But, with a little more structured gameplay to it.

I'm actually looking forward to platform crossplay, if that happens. All of my daughter's friends have the game on Xbox, and it would be nice to set up a server for them all to play together.

While you could definitely improve performance a little by moving off Java and onto C++, I don't think the gains would be as great as people think. The modern JVM is pretty efficient. Also DirectX 12 wouldn't make much difference as, from what I can tell, Minecraft doesn't really demand a ton from the GPU, it's more CPU intensive. Also you can already install some pretty cool shader mods that add shadows, better lighting, waving grass etc that use OpenGL, no DirectX required.

The biggest downside to this is losing multi-platform support on the desktop side. Beign a java application means that both the client and server are automatically Linux and Mac compatible. Creating native C++ (even without directX) versions means that you would have to write separate versions for Windows, Linux, and Mac (which it doesn't sound like MS is interested in doing for obvious reasons).

Also, as others have mentioned, modding is trickier with the native version. With java apps you can open the "jars" which contain all the source code and just start editing. They are often obfuscated so it can be a little tricky, but inserting your own code is relatively easy. That's how people can add new block types and mobs etc to minecraft. The native version would have to be built to support modding through some sort of API. Likely they would have to move to a more data driven model, pulling in information about blocks, items, texture, monsters etc from data files and having behaviours, AI, item interactions etc being written in some sort of runtime, interpreted language like lua.

I cannot remember if I ever bought Minecraft on PC or not...