A VIRAL rumour that Minecraft is “shutting down” in 2020 has been denied by insiders behind the game.
Panicked players feared for their beloved Minecraft after fake news about the game’s servers switching off spread online.
Minecraft has been going strong since it first released back in 2011.
But a prank story about the Microsoft-owned game switching off has been widely shared online.
The article can be traced to a website called Channel45News, a notorious website that lets users create fake stories with their own headlines and photos.
An online troll used the site to create an article with the title: “Minecraft will shut down their servers in late 2020”.
It’s possible to find the story with a simple Google search, which helped it gain traction.
The article spread among gaming communities across the web, leading some gullible users to believe it was the truth.
But Minecraft has now confirmed that the game won’t be switching off.
In a tweet, Microsoft community manager Helen Zbihlyj made clear that Minecraft is here to stay.
“Hey folks, I can confirm that Minecraft servers are NOT shutting down in 2020,” she wrote.
“It’s just a stupid hoax. Feel free to pass this along.”
She later added: “Once more for the folks who missed the tweet the first time I posted it. Minecraft is NOT stopping, Mojang is NOT closing.”
Many Minecraft fans quickly realised that the story was quite obviously fake.
For a start, Minecraft is a hugely successful title, and one of the most widely played games in the world.
The article also blamed Minecraft founder Markus Persson, a.k.a “Notch, as being behind the shut-down.
But Notch hasn’t been involved with Minecraft for a number of years.
Microsoft’s Helen reiterated this fact in a later tweet: “You would think but I can attest that there are still many folks who didn’t get the memo that he stopped working on the game 8 years ago.”
Some of the panic may be partially attributed to the fact that Minecraft: Story Mode a spin-off game was shut down in 2018.
However, that game is separate from Minecraft proper, which should continue to work throughout 2020.
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Would you be sad if Minecraft shut down? Let us know in the comments!
