Kotaku reports that Minecraft publishers Microsoft have sold some $22 billion's worth of HoloLens augmented-reality goggles to the US military, in a move that can only be described as: yeah, I guess that was inevitable.
Why single out Minecraft there, in a story about a company that's published loads of games? Cast your mind back to 2015, and at that year's E3 in Los Angeles, Xbox showed off the HoloLens in a demo using Minecraft. It was amazing. Look, you can watch it below.
Pretty cool, right? Right! And now the United States military gets to play around with a whole lot of Microsoft's AR tech - only, they probably won't be playing, as such.
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As Techcrunch confirms, the 22-billion-dollar deal is for 120,000 headsets delivered over a ten-year period - a sizeable advance on the previously agreed deal, in 2018, when a much smaller arrangement was reported to the value of $480m (via the Verge).
Kotaku notes that the goggles that the military will receive are not the same ones shown off at E3 2015 - they've since been upgraded to the HoloLens 2, and the gadgets will provide all kinds of navigational and communication information to the user, while they're off doing military things. Y'know, blowing stuff up, catching civilians in the crossfire, bending the truth to fit a weird narrative of exceptionalism. Probably.
In related Xbox news, Xbox Live is dead, sorta; and free-to-play multiplayer games really are now free to play, thanks to a new update.
Featured Image Credit: Microsoft