Today, Microsoft released official support for Minecraft on the Oculus Rift VR headset, making good on a promise that was made 11 months ago. That official support, however, helped lead to the end of a popular mod that has been letting players experience Minecraft on the Rift for years now.

"Now that Microsoft/Mojang have released VR support for MCPE/Win10 Minecraft, they are exercising their rights over our unofficial mod (Minecrift)," mod co-creator mabrowning wrote on Reddit. "I received notice a few days ago that I can no longer use the name 'Minecrift' or the minecraft-vr.com domain. I've already shutdown the website, but anyone who wants to get a copy of the code should grab it from GitHub before that goes offline, too."

Later in the thread, mabrowning clarified that Microsoft's problem was merely with the name of the Minecrift project and the minecrift-vr.com domain that hosted it. To be fair to Microsoft, names like Minecrift and Minecraft-VR do seem to carry a high chance of being legitimately confused with the new official "Minecraft for Rift" product (it's somewhat admirable that Microsoft didn't take exception to the name before now, in fact).

While the mod itself could have continued development under a different name, mabrowning said he's decided to shut down Minecrift rather than go that route. The reason has to do with competing VR mod Vivecraft, which was built on top of Minecrift and also works with the Rift through the OpenVR standard. Mabrowning says Vivecraft "is better in every way," obviating the need for his mod.

The continued existence of Vivecraft will be welcome news to the millions of users that still play the original, Java version of Minecraft. That's because Microsoft's official Rift support is limited to the Windows 10 edition of the game, a C++-based fork that was based on the mobile Pocket Edition (and which was recently made cross-compatible with those mobile versions). It's the latest feature split between the two extant, "official" PC versions of the game, a state of affairs has caused concern for fans since the Windows 10 edition was first announced last year.

The new Rift support for Minecraft follows the April release of Minecraft: Gear VR Edition.