Minecraft has been around for nearly a decade in some form, and during that time it has been released to nearly every gaming-capable platform at one point or another.
And at some point, it all became a little too much to manage in terms of technical and development support. The first major casualties of time take the form of support for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii U, and PlayStation Vita editions on Minecraft. The decision was apparently a pretty easy one as all of these editions combined comprised less than 5% of overall players for the game.
Mojang made the decision to support the easier to update modern Bedrock Engine that powers the various version of Minecraft. The following excerpt comes from the announcement post:
We’ve made the difficult decision to focus our efforts to support players where they play Minecraft the most and where we plan to add new features: on Java, PlayStation 4 Edition and the versions of Minecraft made with the Bedrock Engine on other consoles, mobile, and Windows 10.
Minecraft was originally released back in 2009 and has since become a global phenomenon. It’s currently standing as the second best-selling video game of all time, with over a massive 144 million copies sold globally. Fans can expect the game to stick around on newer platforms for many years to come, so don’t get too worried about the death of the game just yet.
Players on older platforms will still get one final major update before support ends, Update Aquatic, which will bring new biomes and creatures to the game. There are also technical updates included such as performance fixes for Switch and other console versions. New themed items and blocks built around a sea-based theme are being added too.
