https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUFDRAEducI
In 2020, Mojang made an announcement that they were going to migrate all Mojang SL Legacy Java Edition Minecraft accounts to Microsoft accounts. You had to do it whether you liked it or not. So, what did I do? Well, I just didn’t. That’s right, for the sake of science, I intentionally didn’t migrate one of my Mojang accounts with the goal to document exactly what would happen to that account and see if there was any possible way I could recover it afterwards. This video is over 3 years in the making, and I’m finally ready to share my results.
You heard that right. I bought a new Mojang account just to sacrifice it to the Microsoft overlords. So, let’s start the timeline here on September 2014 when Microsoft bought Mojang for $2.5 billion. For the next 6 years, Microsoft would pretty much mostly keep their hands off Java Edition. That was until October 21, 2020. Just as we thought we were in the clear for Microsoft’s wrath, the official announcement was made about migrating Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts.
Now, after this announcement, there was a period where users were still able to create new Mojang accounts. So, 3 days later, that’s exactly what I did. With this email of my receipt sent to me on October 24, 2020, my experiment officially began. For the first few months, really nothing happened at all. I occasionally logged in and played Minecraft normally with my Mojang account. But when December 2020 rolled around, all new Minecraft account purchases started to be Microsoft accounts. That’s when I knew that they were serious about this whole Microsoft account thing, but existing Mojang accounts were not able to migrate yet.
From the start, Mojang said that Microsoft account migration would begin in early 2021. But March 31, 2021, came and went, and still no migration. Three months later, in early June, still players were not able to migrate. I thought for a bit that I was in the clear as I had quite the hesitation of migrating my Mojang accounts to Microsoft. They’re a big company that collects a lot of user data and has a terms of service that was vastly different from the Minecraft EULA, essentially meaning we had to agree to both. I felt like this was kind of a sneaky move on their part to gain more legal control over Minecraft accounts without having to announce a huge change to the Minecraft EULA. Not surprisingly, people didn’t take much notice of this.
But as June progressed, migration was finally opened to select accounts and would slowly keep expanding to others over the next few months until eventually all Mojang accounts were available to migrate. Many months later, on February 18, 2022, I received my first actual email from Mojang about account migration. They said that starting on March 10, users would no longer be able to log into Minecraft with their Mojang accounts. But that date came and went, and because I was using the old Minecraft launcher that didn’t have auto-updating or have insane amounts of bloat or eye candy, I was still able to log in with my Mojang accounts and play on Minecraft servers all the way until August 2022, when Mojang stopped allowing unmigrated accounts to authenticate when joining Minecraft servers. This was the turning point when I was pretty much forced to migrate all of my other Minecraft accounts except for this one. From here on out, this account was essentially unusable.
Then, starting on September 1 and continuing over the course of 8 months, I got three more reminder emails that were identical to the last one. On May 17, 2023, I received another email announcing the last day to migrate was on September 19, 2023. That marked the official deadline where I would not be able to migrate my account after that date. Just 9 days before the final day, I got one final email reminder saying it was time to migrate. Nope, not going to happen. The day has come, migrations to Microsoft accounts have officially ended. Except, surprisingly, Mojang very graciously gave us holdouts 90 extra days to give us new copies of Minecraft.
This was a turning point for me. Do I take the offer or be a complete idiot and keep the experiment going? What do you think I chose? Not only did I completely ignore migrating my account, but I also missed the time period to claim a new Minecraft account. But I’m not going to end this experiment so soon. I wanted to see if it was still possible after all of this to somehow get my account back or at least get a new copy of the game. So, I decided to contact Minecraft support, making sure to include my order and transaction ID to see if they would be able to restore my account at this point. Of course, I instantly received an automated response saying that any support tickets after September 19, 2023, regarding migration would go ignored. Crap. Now, this has to be the end, right? Not so fast.
You see, in the Minecraft EULA is a section covering binding arbitration, which only shows up in the Nintendo Switch EULA for some reason. Basically, it’s something that lots of big companies in the US put in their end-user contracts that forces users to settle disputes out of court with their arbitrators instead of suing them. But unfortunately, arbitration usually costs money, way more than the 26.95 I originally paid for it. I also included a copy of my original receipt For good measure.
Now it was off to the post office. I got an email response from Microsoft. Did I do it? Did I find the secret way to get my account back? Of course not. Just another cookie-cutter corporate response telling me that the migration period had ended. Just to put the cherry on top, they said, “We invite you to acquire Minecraft through a Microsoft account to continue enjoying the game.” Acquire Minecraft, you say? Why don’t you just say, “Sorry, dummy, you have to buy the game again,” even though I already completely paid for this game just over 3 years ago? I guess the term “buy” literally doesn’t mean anything anymore if companies can just get away with taking your purchased items away simply because of inactivity.
I was obviously not happy with this response. So, as a last-ditch effort, I sent a Better Business Bureau complaint, which Microsoft also responded to, even referring to the notice of dispute I sent earlier, and just copied and pasted the original response in this letter. So, I ended up reading this response too. You can pause if you want to read my whole rant, but unfortunately, after I sent that, I never got any response back from Microsoft.
So, what did I learn from intentionally not migrating my account? Well, we now know that Microsoft was pretty serious and literally took my paid copy of Minecraft away. Now, in my opinion, I feel that this whole forced migration thing was a pretty crappy move. Nobody deserves to have something they paid for and expected to keep be taken away from them like this. I’m pretty sure there are thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of Minecraft accounts that just never got migrated that are now lost forever. Just reading the most recent comments of the original migration announcement video shows other users’ frustrations with the exact same issue. Now, I know some of you might say in the comments, “They had 3 years to migrate. Sucks for them.” But let me just remind you all that life happens. Maybe you just weren’t interested in Minecraft for 3 years but later decided to get back into it, only to realize that your account was deleted. Forcing old players to rebuy the game for no reason other than “sorry, you have to” is kind of an anti-consumer move.
In comparison, look at Google. They’re a big company that everyone loves to hate on. But let me tell you this: Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion. Shortly after, old YouTube accounts were migrated to Google accounts. Now, 17 years later, if you, for some reason, still have a legacy YouTube account, Google still to this day allows you to migrate it to a Google account. And keep in mind, YouTube is a free service. I feel that it’s perfectly reasonable to expect Microsoft at minimum to credit users with a new Minecraft account if they missed the migration period, especially if they have the original receipt with the transaction ID. I hope Microsoft reconsiders their decision to lock out users like that even when they have undeniable proof of account ownership.
Anyways, that’s the end of this crazy and admittedly stupid experiment. Now that I have the rest of my accounts migrated, maybe now I can safely ghost this game for a while.