Instead of allowing this sort of pattern to be decentralized and permissionless, they are forcing it to remain on a centralized and permissioned stack that allows them to consistently extract rent, exert control over what kind of sales happen, and limit how users can dispose of these assets.
You can’t even sell back your Minecoins, you are only given license to use them for the Minecraft Marketplace. Had this been a standard ERC20 token the company would have no way to block you from reselling unwanted coins on a secondary market.
Your comparison is very selective.
They are preventing this for the reason others have already mentioned: they don't get a piece of the action.
A) Ban from all servers (even private): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860168
B) Forcing people to provide personal information to play the game at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32142847
Together create effective permabans for anyone Microsoft wants
If you crack the game to not validate through Mojang servers, then it will probably bypass the ban, but I don't know if you'll be able to connect to a 3rd party server which excepts the users to be authenticated
Even e.g. Roblox does a much better job of trying to integrate the creator/modder experience.
(I mean, this is a huge pipe dream. MS has always had the resources but literally has never had anything remotely close to a vision like this)
The real reason is that cryptocurrency makes it relatively easy for people to transact without Microsoft taking a cut. That's it.
Minetest had no such restrictions by the way.
