Yes, but Minecraft was on sale for a year before it ever went into “Beta,” back before it was in Alpha even. In fact, it wasn’t until one of the last Alpha updates that the earliest semblance of “Minecraft” as we know it really began to appear. The Beta updates added a lot of core features we take for granted in the game, like beds for sleeping, tall grass for seeds, redstone repeaters, pistons, sprinting, hunger, etc.

Watch the end result be you can’t find random chests in Minecraft dungeons or Terraria caves cause it falls under the category of “lootbox” in games…

(May seem hyperbolic, but we are talking about 70 year old boomers trying to make regulations for video games. I’m not sure I have the most positive view of the potential outcome)

I hope this wasn’t used as an excuse to disqualify the game so they wouldn’t have to give it an award… Cause if it turns out it was, that would look really bad…

Honestly, people are mostly* blaming the victim here. I used to adore playing Geoguessr years ago, but that came to an end when a subscription was needed to play it. That came about because Google started charging exorbitant prices for the Google Maps and Streetview API.

*Yeah, the other issues like lacking features and not using the subscription from the website are dumb, and shouldn’t have been a thing for the Steam release. But the core issue of the subscription? The fault for that lies squarely with Google…