I hope we can all begin to learn some lessons from stuff like this; I think this kind of thing is the only path to a remotely interesting "metaverse" to the extent that such an idea is valuable.

And it's so weird. It's obvious that private companies buying game properties is very often death and annoyance -- but it's (sadly to me) equally obvious that straight-up "nothing but free open source" is unlikely to get the engagement and interest. (e.g. otherwise Minetest would have taken over Minecraft a while ago)

I have no good answers here, but I hope people think about the question?