I am not sure I would even call Minecraft as having a "game engine". An engine is usually generalized so it can be extracted and used for many games.
> And its engine wasn't especially good.
It was good enough. It's non trivial to do, despite appearances.
> These days a large % of Minecraft installs are a C++ version of the game and not the original Java version, because it's really not about the engine.
But is the Bedrock version even the majority? It's been out for years and adoption is very slow. If it was not for game consoles it might not have taken off at all. And the main reason is mods. Which are not part of the "engine" as you put it, and were enabled by the technology choice.
We would need to know how many Minecraft installs are on mobile and console, where Java isn't an option. I would expect it's a large % of the overall userbase, but I don't have access to the numbers. Switch and Android both open Minecraft up to a huge number of people who either don't have a PC or can't install Minecraft on it.
Agreed that mods are a big part of the experience and would only really have flourished using technologies like Java (what Notch chose), C# or JavaScript, not C++.
> And its engine wasn't especially good.
It was good enough. It's non trivial to do, despite appearances.
> These days a large % of Minecraft installs are a C++ version of the game and not the original Java version, because it's really not about the engine.
But is the Bedrock version even the majority? It's been out for years and adoption is very slow. If it was not for game consoles it might not have taken off at all. And the main reason is mods. Which are not part of the "engine" as you put it, and were enabled by the technology choice.