Do you have to buy minecraft if you are running against your own server?

I want to run the minecraft client and server on a local network.

To avoid what appears to be a pile of "free" scam sites, I want to purchase and download it from the official site.

However, on the official site it appears that you can't do that. It seems like you are buying access to minecraft.net. I don't want to play on public servers. I just want to download the .jars and run them locally.

Does the software validate against public servers even though you are playing locally and potentially offline?

Do you need a subscription to minecraft.net, or is there somewhere else to download the game .jars?

Solution 1:

I don't think you quite understand Minecraft's business model.

Minecraft checks in with Minecraft.net as a rudimentary form of DRM - if you can't log in, you don't have an account with the site; if you haven't bought an account with the site, you haven't bought the game. It's a little bit like Starcraft 2 in that respect - you must log in to your online account in order to play the game, even in single player.

It's been that way since the first for-pay version of Minecraft, before multiplayer was even a feature. It's literally just a quick "do you actually own the game" check, nothing more.

It's also not a subscription. You pay for the game once, and then the account with which you purchased the game can download it from the website. There is no recurring fee.

TL;DR: You do just purchase and download the .jar files.