Do you really think this would be materially different if they used Minetest? To be frank, nothing in Minecraft as a game (rather than the code) deserves intellectual property protection; it copies games that came before and was copied by games that came after. It is an excellent, well-designed implementation of a very basic concept.
> nothing in Minecraft as a game (rather than the code) deserves intellectual property protection
> excellent, well-designed implementation
And there we see the problem laid bare. Excellent designs that are well-executed are not worthless facets of the real product. As we can see from Minecraft's success, that is the real product. People play video games for the experience, not to execute some logical construct a formal proof showing that it's fun. The reason that this demo uses Minecraft as opposed to a Minecraft knockoff is because Minecraft is better, and they are capitalizing on that. Even if that game is based on a well-worn concept, the many varied design problems you solve when making a game are harder than development, which is why damn near every game that starts open source is a knockoff of something other people already designed. It's not Mojang was some marketing powerhouse that knocked infiniminer off it's perch without merit.
> And there we see the problem laid bare. Excellent designs that are well-executed are not worthless facets of the real product. As we can see from Minecraft's success, that is the real product.
Which is why I said "as a game, rather than the code", specifically. My whole point is that the elements which were assembled into it are not the valuable part!
I mean, what is Minecraft? Mine blocks, craft items. Fight skeletons, spiders, zombies and exploding zombies. The end boss is a dragon. It's Generic The Game.
The thing that the AI is training on is the thing without value - the look. Mojang gave that away in the billions of stream-hours, to their benefit.
The interface, look and feel, controls, color pallet, textures, animation, camera angles and movement, icons, branding, music, sfx, vfx... Those are all part of the experience and why it succeeded. Especially in games— people play games for the experience and the look and feel is a huge part of the experience.
Developers always think that these things have no value, yet as someone that's done a whole lot of work in both design and back-end development, the design and interface affect how people feel about the software far more than any technical underpinning. People play games because it makes them feel things, not because they want to interact with some novel game mechanic or use a technically superior engine.
And that is why pretty much the only open-source user-facing software with broad support— eg Firefox, blender, signal— are the ones that are foundation-backed with product managers that prioritize design. That's the core reason Mastodon failed to replace Twitter despite an incredible amount of momentum, the reason so few people use Linux desktops, and the reason that you'll have a hard time finding a professional photographer that's never tried gimp and an even harder time finding one that used it more than once. I've seen so many people pour thousands of collective hours into high-quality software with some cool conceptual ideas only for it to languish, unused. Developers know how much effort it takes to create software, and since they have a working mental model of how software works under the hood, they're far more tolerant to shitty interfaces. To most people, the interface IS the software. Developers, largely, have no clue what it takes to create high-quality design, and therefore undervalue it, and blame lack of FOSS adoption on commercial software marketing. User feedback doesn't support that assumption.
People buy things that look great just because they look great. When the pleasure of interaction is the whole point, technically or conceptually exceptional software with a substandard look and feel has no value.
