It's a great reminder that the customer doesn't care about the code. What matters is the experience and overall fidelity of the product shipped.
The language you pick, the quality of code you write, the comments and documentation, are all products (gifts) targeting your future self, future peers, and employer when it comes time to make changes to the software.
I'm not sure this applies as strongly in Minecraft's case specifically, because of the critical importance of its modding community to its wild success. Normally it wouldn't matter what language you pick in terms of how popular the game is going to become, except it just so happened that by choosing the JVM they gave the ability to the community to decompile the game and add the content they want. Maybe this wasn't intended and Notch chose Java because it was what he happened to know, but it's my belief that if Minecraft had been written in C++ instead then Mojang would not have the brand recognition it does today. Anecdotally one of my friends tried the RTX version of the game which was rewritten in C++, and his reaction amounted to "it's fine, but there's no mods, so it's irrelevant." And that's in spite of the fact that modded Minecraft is a minefield of incompatibilities between years old versions and can easily consume 10 gigabytes of RAM and millions of extraneous CPU cycles. Nobody cares, because at the end of the day modded Minecraft is the only way they can get the specific experience they want out of a video game, and the only reason this is possible at all, even if it will never be performant, is the JVM.
But that's only because Minecraft is one of the most popular video games in history, and not the kind of thing that a developers for a game nowhere near as successful would worry about before gaining a sizeable audience. What good is a modding system if not many people want to use it? And depending on the game a mod system might not be as warranted, so in those cases the choice of language doesn't matter as much.
True, but I find it amusing that none of that even mattered and the community was persistent enough to build an entire architecture, database and IRC bot solely for deobfuscating the source of Minecraft anyways. So long as nobody would get sued for it, it was still possible from a technical standpoint, so the motivated people did it anyways.
And now it seems that Twitch and other "official" entities have conceded to the fact that modding was really the only reason so many people play Minecraft at all and they integrated installing mods into their official launcher. Server hosting for Minecraft is a legitimate business since you'd need enough RAM and single-core performance for mods also, so they advertise "mod-capable" hosting plans.
On top of that the entire decompiled and deobfuscated source of Minecraft 1.22 is sitting on GitHub to search through.
The sheer extent of modding capability that Java enabled caused this weird conflict between the interests of the parties wanting to retain the intellectual property of the game through obfuscation while at the same time admitting that people undoing it and using the source themselves for modding is never going to go away, and trying to forcefully get rid of it for the sake of this legitimacy anyways brings no benefit and would only anger and drive away the audience who already comes to expect mods. And then some group would probably just hack together some unsanctioned server/client package from the JARs that are already widespread and keep playing the old versions forever, since they'd still want to play modded Minecraft anyways, and there's no reason the whims of a few corporations ought to invalidate the past several years of modded Minecraft experience they've lived through already. At least it's a better case for modding than purely competitive games since a lot of Minecraft is about construction.
Sometimes I think that the only games that will truly last for the ages where new things are still being created and discovered regularly are the ones whose source code is in the control of the players, and they aren't actively poached for "stealing" in an attempt to extract a few more dollars per person. That, and the playerbase being motivated enough to keep developing content for them. It seems Minecraft is one of those few games as of present.
> That, and the playerbase being motivated enough to keep developing content for them.
This by far is the most important thing. You could have a beautiful open source game but if no one knows about it or wants to play it, it's less than useful.
Some of the biggest modding communities I am aware of came from closed-source games; the Sims has always had strong, years-long modding lifetimes, and SimCity 4 and Cities Skylines after it had total overhaul mods that changed entire game systems, as well as thriving communities of less ambitious mods.
The language you pick, the quality of code you write, the comments and documentation, are all products (gifts) targeting your future self, future peers, and employer when it comes time to make changes to the software.