One of the OLDEST Minecraft Bedrock Servers was Shut Down…

On april 16th 2022 one of the oldest and most well-known minecraft bedrock edition servers will shut down forever this mini-game server known as broken lens was a staple among minecraft bedrock edition non-featured servers for over six years but due to a lack of money to keep the server up and running

The owner gabriel dickinson announced that the server is going to have to permanently close its doors we’ve seen this happen with multiple servers over the past few years most notably the hive in its java server in 2021 and countless other smaller servers in the same time

Frame as well it’s sad to see stuff like this whenever it happens and in this video i’m gonna go more in depth into the demise of broken lens what led to this happening and what this shutdown means for minecraft bedrock and the greater minecraft communities interested let’s get started Alright so if you’ve never played on broken ones before well you probably won’t be able to for much longer after this video is published in case you can’t get onto the server or literally just watching this after the fact here’s a little rundown of what the server is

Or was broken lens released to what was then known as minecraft pocket edition on january 14th 2016. remember that windows 10 edition and bedrock for consoles wasn’t even a thing yet and wouldn’t be until december of 2016. at the start the server had a few games

Ranging from tnt run to splag to skywars and a few other ones as well according to the owner gabriel broken lens was an instant hit gaining over 50 000 new players within the first week over time it continued to grow and added more games like quakecraft murder mystery and

Their own version of mario kart called crazy carts ultimately they saw a lot of success reaching concurrent player accounts of almost 15 000 online at a time and at the moment have over 12 million unique players that have checked out the server at some point or another

As you could probably tell though this success didn’t last forever let’s talk about the forums post made by the broken lens owner on april 8th announcing the shutdown of the server like i mentioned at the beginning a large part of the downfall of broken lens is attributed to

A lack of funds gabriel mentions that there was a campaign in december of 2021 asking for people to purchase ranks and support the server in any way that they could and that kept the server running for a little bit longer but ultimately it wasn’t enough he even goes on to say

That he used some of his own money to keep the server running for a little while longer but obviously that’s not sustainable unless things massively turn around which as you can tell unfortunately didn’t happen he says that this is in part due to broken lens never being able to become a featured server

Citing unfair competition and that minecraft chooses which servers succeed and which servers fail he thinks this contributed to broken lenses decline for a long time and i’ll discuss this later in the video either way it’s clear to see that things likely would have been quite a lot different if broken ones had

Got the opportunity to become a featured server finally it’s also said that running broken wins took a big toll on gabriel from burnout to not being able to find developers and just the fact that the server had been on a big decline for a long while ultimately he

Decided that it was time to pull the plug on the server and announce that on april 16th at 11 59 eastern time broken lens would be shut down for good now after reading all of that i had to know what did the broken winds community

Think of all of this in the replies to the forum’s post announcing the shutdown there was understandably quite a lot of sadness you also found some disbelief denial anger and so many stories of people reminiscing over the good times that they had on the server however i

Really wanted to talk to one specific person that i knew had a lot of history on the server and if you watch other bedrock edition content then you might know of jbro plays who actually started off as a content creator on broken lens here’s what he had to say about the

Server shutting down so like broken lens was my first server that i played on starting back in 2017 i was a late bloomer of minecraft that was my very first server but you know playing afternoons on it um it was always like a pretty buggy server but i guess like it

Didn’t really matter because it was a lot of fun when i heard it was shutting down like it didn’t surprise me but at the same time kind of made me briefly think about how i used to play it so much and it’s like man it’s kind of sad because

I don’t know in a way like broken lens used to be my hive until i like kind of drifted away from it as it kind of worsened over time so seeing it shut down it is sad to see but it was also pretty much expected but uh i’m

Definitely grateful for like the good times i had on there for sure now honestly i think that most broken lens players can share this same sentiment obviously being sad that the server is shutting down but also for the most part not being very surprised either i feel

Like most people could see the writing on the wall and knew that this had been coming for a while now once again the forums post that i discussed earlier was from the point of view of gabriel the owner of broken lens however the actual state of the server in the past few

Months tells a bit of a different story which is the one that people had seen coming when i was live streaming on broken lens back in november of 2021 there was a former staff member in chat talking about some of their experiences in the past with the server now keep in

Mind that this is the experience of only one person but it’s still pretty eye opening to look at they said that there was next to no communication between moderators and higher up staff and that quite a lot of the moderation team left as a result of that following this the

Amount of people cheating on the server increased in the so-called anti-cheat that they had didn’t do much either which i can verify with my own experience in that same live stream so yeah the main issue with with broken lens is that while the games are cool there’s no moderation at all there’s no

Handy cheat i feel like the server could probably become better if there were like moderation staff if the anti-cheat worked but that’s also only for the pvp game modes another interesting point that hazard the former staff member had was that broken ones actually couldn’t become a featured

Server because of the fact that it was cross-compatible with both java and bedrock edition we can be relatively certain that this is true since hazard is a relatively high up staff member for cubecraft now but it kind of goes against gabriel’s point that broken lens was struggling due to not being able to

Become a featured server i just found that relatively interesting to think about when doing research for this video i also want to talk about one more thing a few months ago i also played broken ones for a video that never ended up getting released and even then you could

See the server was not in a good state they were already beginning to shut down some of the game modes that weren’t getting many players and i had to literally get people from my community to join just so i could fill up the games that did still work all in all it

Really seems like broken lens had been doomed to fail for a while now let’s take a step back though and talk about what this means for the entire bedrock edition server community obviously it’s a really sad sight when you see one of the oldest servers in the bedrock edition community shut down i

Say it’s one of the oldest because it was around when we were still on minecraft pocket edition and it was one of the more popular servers when everything switched to bedrock edition while i personally didn’t play on it all that much i can still respect the fact that it’s part of minecraft bedrock

Edition history but it goes deeper than that while the owner’s claim to not being able to be a bedrock edition featured server was debunked by the fact that they have both bedrock and java crossplay on their server i do still think it’s vowel to say that it’s really

Hard to be a bedrock edition server and stay afloat if you’re not featured i mean who would you rather be back financially by a couple of kids with their mom’s credit cards or some data harvesting billionaires yes it’s really hard to compete but i also don’t think featured servers are anti-competitive

Either like gabriel says in the forums post on a somewhat related note i also think that broken ones might have been trying to do a little bit too much and that’s what stretched them too thin i mean how many times have we said it at

This point they had a bedrock and a java server they were trying to maintain for cross-play both at the same time and if you take a walk in their hub you’ll still probably come across new game modes after two or three minutes of walking they’ve just got so much stuff

And i feel like it cost them so much time and money that it eventually led to their downfall in some form or another we’ve seen examples in the past of this like mineplex on their java server and even their bedrock server to an extent just having so much stuff that it’s hard

To maintain at all i have a prediction though and it’s not all that good i predict that this type of stuff is going to continue happening to non-featured bedrock edition servers i can’t tell you which ones this will happen to but running minecraft servers and especially

Starting them from the ground up is just so difficult obviously every server has a chance to fail but that chance is so much more likely if you’re a non-featured server and unless you make it to a high pixel level it’s almost destined to happen at some point but

Let’s take a hypothetical what if featured servers just didn’t exist at all while in minecraft bedrock edition look like at that point well if you want to learn more about that i recommend going and checking out the video that just showed up on screen but that’s

Gonna be it for this video so thank you all for watching and i will see you in the next one peace out you