Right-wing developer hijacks Minecraft project

A developer has locked out his other co-developers over “leftist queer ideology” on popular Minecraft project PolyMC.

The Minecraft project, PolyMC, has been commandeered by one of the developers, evicting all other developers and locking them out of the code.

The only change so far removes rules from the project’s Code of Conduct that protects marginalised people, nicknamed “reclaim polymc from the leftoids.”

Some context: PolyMC is a platform that allows users to manage multiple installs of Minecraft on a single computer, allowing a user to have widely different Minecraft installs, modpacks, and more at once.

Unfortunate but urgent announcement to make.

If you use PolyMC as your launcher, we are urging all users to switch off of it immediately. Not tomorrow, today. The main keyholder for PolyMC's infrastructure has been compromised.

— Modrinth (@modrinth) October 17, 2022

The project featured multiple developers working on it, until yesterday that is. Mass eviction of developers from the project mainly involved one developer removing other developers’ permissions, reports GamingOnLinux (Thanks, PCGamer!)

As both reports mention, no one knows what “leftist queer ideology” ignited the hostile takeover, as again, the only change committed in the project was removing the rules that prohibited transphobic, homophobic, and racist abuse.

While the hijacking was originally thought to be the work of a hacker, later it was revealed to be the developer himself, who claims that “he was just never public about hating” the basic protections granted towards marginalised people.

In May, that same developer argued that the protection clauses should be removed, calling them “unnecessary and repetitive.”

The argument went nowhere, likely leading to the developer deciding to steal control from the other developers to make it happen.

Minecraft has many different custom modpacks and game versions, so a platform to manage them all is handy. Picture: Mojang

Since the hijacking, the other developers have since formed a new group and are working on a new project, called PrismLauncher.

Fans of PolyMC may wish to consider uninstalling the program as well — there is no telling what type of malicious code or weird ideologies will be shoehorned into the program in the future.

In other gaming news, a Call of Duty player was banned from the recent Fortune’s Keep tournament over a harassment video that, weirdly, ended in a fake marriage proposal towards another player.

The upcoming Call of Duty game, Modern Warfare 2, will also use the conterversial SMS Protect system that left many Overwatch 2 players unable to play the game, as it locked out players with prepaid phone plans.

Written by Junior Miyai on behalf of GLHF.