Hi. I know that this post will be quite a wall of text. You decide for yourself if you want to read through the whole thing; nobody is forcing you to – but it would give you the best insight into a trend that is starting to raise red flags. It's about the community, and Minecraft as we know it today.

First, let me start off with an introduction of Curse. Curse, Inc. is a technology company specializing in making products targeted at gamers. They run a large number of forums and wikis, and is ubiquitous in several large gaming communities today, including Minecraft. Curse has done a lot of good things to the Minecraft community, such as giving revenue to modders, centralizing mods in a single place, and helping modpack creators out with easy creation of modpacks (like mod licensing). They have been a good driving force behind the community, and has helped us get to where we are today.

However, there is a very worrying trend with Curse that does not quite receive the attention that it deserves. A post in /r/feedthebeast is what prompted me to write this thread. There trend is the centralization that Curse provides to Minecraft communities. I'll try and break it up into individual points.

Ownership

Minecraft

Minecraft started out as an indie game by Markus Persson, aka. Notch. Notch started Mojang AB, and the company hired more developers. The game just kept growing, and eventually partnered with 4J Studios to provide console versions of the game, and Mojang was bought by Microsoft. Mojang is still largely in control of the game, but Microsoft is the company that ultimately owns it. (As pointed out by /u/jurarajupiter, Mojang is still 100% Mojang and they control the game, and Microsoft's involvement has not changed that. Mojang is, as a company, owned by Microsoft, but this has not affected the company in any way.)

The wiki

A wiki was set up to manage community information about the game. I don't know exactly by whom it was set up. However, Curse has owned the wiki for a very long time. It serves as the community's main source of information on the game, and presents an easy way for beginners to get acquainted with its quirks and mechanics.

The forums

A forum was created by citricsquid in 2009. It served as the first community Minecraft forum, and was acquired by Curse in late 2010. It is the biggest Minecraft forum in existence today.

Modding

Many players argue that without mods, there is no way that Minecraft would have survived for as long as it has. Mods add unique gameplay features to Minecraft, and help make the game a whole lot more interesting, if you ever get bored of the vanilla game. Mods were (and still are) primarily advertised and distributed on the Minecraft Forums. Curse came along with CurseForge, which allowed modders to host their mods in a simple, central place, earning some revenue (author reward points) along with it.

Modpacks

Players got creative and started putting mods together into packs for people to play with. Modpacks are distributed by many entities, but the two biggest are the Technic Platform and Feed The Beast. Curse bought FTB and attempted to buy Technic as well.

Others

Couple this with texture-packs and world downloads, and it becomes clear that Curse has a pretty established foothold in the Minecraft community. Planet Minecraft are also pretty big on the latter two aspects of the game. /r/Minecraft is moderated by the community.

TL;DR

The problem

As you can probably see from the table above, a very, very large part of the community is based around the services provided by a single company. In cases where multiple providers compete, Curse has a significant share of content. This is the trend that worries me. Due to the current distribution of Minecraft community content, Curse has more control over the future of Minecraft than Mojang has. I say this since while the game itself is owned by Mojang (Microsoft), the services that the community relies on are almost all platforms owned by Curse.

So why do I post about this now? I introduced this post with a link to a post in /r/feedthebeast. Here's the link again. The post is about recent moves made by Curse in relation to high-profile members of the Minecraft community. For the uninitiated, Jadedcat, Myriathi and Eyamaz were unexpectedly and suddenly let go from Curse a few days ago. This is not a good sign. To quote /u/SynfulChaot from that thread;

This may just be that significant thing, Fyber. If they're willing to abandon such prominent and active people as Jaded and Eyamaz without warning, then that doesn't bode well for anyone.

Curse has been involved in a few practices to promote their own content. This thread was also discussed in /r/feedthebeast; I encourage you to read some oft he comments in that discussion, as it highlights issues with the community monopolization that Curse is attempting.

So why were they laid off? /u/DZCreeper has a theory:

When Curse first started edging themselves into the modded MC community there were warnings. Some have sailed the deep and salty waters before but ironically the 'veterans' ignored the warnings. Now that they have a firm toehold some of the more elite members of the community are useless to Curse.

As a company they exist solely to make money and have zero moral issue with revamping and potentially destroying an entire community to do so. Saying 'I told you so!' is immature but I have the urge to jump on the nearest fence and holler it.

/u/DZCreeper makes a very valid point about how companies are run. They cannot operate without profit, and the community itself does not matter in those decisions. To highlight this, when Slowpoke commented about the situation in the FTB thread, he cared more about the FTB-Curse relationship than he did about the community. Ask yourself this question: Who really cares about the FTB-Curse relationship? Do you care about it? This is corporate-level PR speak.

"So what?"

This might not seem like a very big issue now, but it has a very large potential impact. If the Minecraft community turns out to not be profitable for Curse, they will implement changes to monetize their platforms that we won't like. What about membership fees on the forums or CurseForge? They may fire more prominent community members, or, in the absolute worst case scenario, pull the plug on the entire project. This is very unlikely to happen in the short term, mind you, but we can't forget it as a far-future possibility. Don't trick yourself into thinking that Curse will always care about the Minecraft community. Changes like those have happened on many other sites before, and they're bound to happen again. It's all about the money.

This post is mostly to serve as a warning about the direction we're heading in. If you read through it all, thank you for doing that. I appreciate it. If not, I'll TL;DR for you below. Either way, we need to be aware of what can happen if Curse decides to change their platforms. There are many smaller providers of similar services out there, such as mods.io, which attempt to serve as an alternative to the Curse establishment. Not all succeed, such as the Creepr forums as forum.creepr.org, which drowned as it never got enough traction. However, we must be prepared in case something happens. Again, Curse has been a big help for us so far, but we can't rely on a single point of failure.

Finally, quoting /u/Draakon0,

It's a central source

While great in its own way (you need to go trough 1 launcher to get everything), its also very bad. There need's to be different sources with different policies and rules, to make sure there is competition AND everybody can play and mod that suites their needs. Take even Nexus as an example before Skyrim got Workshop integration. It is a great site with great tools, but some of the content from there is banned. If Nexus was the only modding site only available, some of the mods outside Nexus wouldn't even exist.

Keeping all the eggs in one basket is bad.

TL;DR: We all rely upon the goodwill of a single company, a company which cares more about profit than community, for almost all of our community creations. As it currently stands, Curse has more control over the future of Minecraft than Mojang has.