What a dim view. More to the point, one that cuts both ways.

Children playing outside are in the early stages of a physically and financially devastating addiction perpetrated by those monsters in the sporting goods and sports medicine industries. Before you know it, they'll be loading up Subarus full of REI snowboarding gear and burning gasoline in the direction of Tahoe. Keep your kids away from the outdoors, everyone, there lies capitalism!

Children reading are merely a resource being ripened for exploitation by publishing companies, who have somehow duped the taxpayer into providing customers for them!

Communicating with each other? Oh God, the horror.

Even purely imaginative play in the backyard is how children come to desire backyards for their own children, and the suburban houses, mortgages, and cars that come with them. Public parks, well now you're just softening them up to support Big Government.

Everything about childhood has commercial implications if you squint hard enough.

Is that really the case though? I mean, I'm no longer a customer of Mavis Beacon, Mario Teaches Typing, and Dino Park Tycoon ...

Dino Park Tycoon - now that takes me back. Would love to take a trip down that memory lane.

Wonderful, thanks for sharing. :)

:O

It worked pretty well for Microsoft though.

Is that not a bit early?

I mean, sure, it's 5 to 7 years old depending on your count, and it has quite a lot of toys, but "lifetime" seems a bit of a stretch.

Star Wars has for sure stood the test of time, and I have no problem imagining Minecraft being Lego 2.0/Lego digital or something else entirely, but right now I see it merely as really great/pervasive product with some branding.

It's more about breeding early comfort and familiarity with Microsoft software. It's the same tactic Apple and MS use in schools

Minecraft bears absolutely no interface similarity to any other Microsoft product. What you're saying happens and is already happening with the educational discounts on MS Office, but Minecraft doesn't contribute to that at all.

I can see that it might be creating familiarity with the company name (or is it? what fraction of people distinguish between OEM, OS and software vendor?), but unlike gas stations and hotels I don't see software as a place where that matters a lot.

Really? Minecraft existed long before Microsoft bought it.

Quite a few people learned programming in Visual Basic and went on to have rich, diverse careers.

Yeah but Minecraft is perfectly suited for children entertainment. It's not Joe Kool selling cigarettes to kids, it's a video game about cubes.

I could potentially see a conflict if we were talking about a subscription-based or microtransaction-based game, but Minecraft is a one-time purchase. And, I expect, most of the kids who are super-excited about Minecraft already have a license anyway.

Well, once per platform. Plus increasingly in-game purchases of texture packs etc..

Though Minecraft is still cheap and low on commercialisation compared to a lot of the "let's annoy them until they succumb and pay for more diamonds/gems/gold/tokens" games.

commercialisation of the primary product (the game in its various editions) maybe.

Gotta wonder how much the merchandise (clothing, mugs, posters, toys, freaking lego sets) is earning them though.

On the other hand, if my daughter is anything to go by, they would play Minecraft no matter what. Might as well get some education in there while they are at it.