My kids have had a Nintendo Switch for a little over year. I bought them Minecraft for it, naturally. For Christmas, we purchased a second Switch for them, so they could each have their own and not have squabbles about whose turn it was and who played too long. So, naturally, I purchased Minecraft for them again. We now have 2 copies of the game on the Switch. Which got me to thinking how many times I’ve purchased the game since it came out all those years ago.

I bought the original Java edition before the game was officially released. Before the Nether was an area, and before all the stuff Microsoft has added since their purchase of the game. After my friends on Xbox started playing it, I purchased the Xbox edition, and later, the upgraded Xbox One edition when my Xbox 360 died. I’ve now purchased it twice more for the Switch, for my kids. If that were the end of the purchases, it would be great. Now, however, they want to play with Daddy. So, I’ve purchased the Windows 10 edition and set the kids up with their own Xbox accounts and Nintendo accounts so we can all play together on our own systems.

Setting them up with their own accounts, under two different family groups (Nintendo and Xbox) and getting all the info I needed so they would be able to play a game with me, is possibly the worst gaming experience I’ve had in years. It took hours to set it up, because the Xbox website only worked about 40% of the time, and I kept having the reload the pages or start the process over from scratch. It’s done now, but it took me almost 3 hours to get everything set up and various privacy settings adjusted to be able to allow them to get in to my world.

I’ve bought Minecraft in its various forms 6 times over the years, ranging from $20 to $30, and all for different gaming systems. If I have to buy it for another console, it will be too soon.

Side note: Playing Minecraft with Ray Tracing is incredible. I thought it was a gimmick until I loaded up a Ray Tracing world on my PC and messed around. It’s possibly the best thing I’ve ever seen in a video game. That is all.