In 2020, Mojang made an announcement that they’re going to migrate all Mojang / Legacy Java edition Minecraft accounts to Microsoft accounts. And you had to do it whether you like 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 will happen to that account and see if there is any possibility I can recover 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 Sep. 2014 when Microsoft bought Mojang for $2.5 billion. For the next 6 years, Microsoft would pretty much mostly keep its 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. And with this E-Mail of my receipt sent to me on Oct. 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 Dec 2020 rolled around, all new Minecraft account purchases started to be Microsoft accounts thats when I knew this whole Microsoft account thing is serious. But existing Mojang accounts were not able to migrate yet. From the start, Mojang said that Microsoft account migration will begin in early 2021. But March 31, 2021 came and went. And still no migration. 3 months in early June, still, players were not able to migrate. I thought for a bit that I was in the clear, as I have quite the hesitation migrating my Mojang accounts to Microsoft. They’re a big company that collects a lot of user data and had a terms of services that was vastly different from the Minecraft EULA. Essentially meaning we have to agree to both. I felt that this is kind of a sneaky move on their part to gain more legal control to Minecraft accounts without having to announce a huge change to the Minecraft EULA. And surprisingly, people didn’t take much notice to this. But as June progressed, migration was finally open to selected 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 Feb. 18, 2022, I received my first actual E-Mail from Mojang about account migration. They said starting on March 10, 2022, users would not be able to log in to Minecraft with their Mojang accounts. But that day came and went. And because I was using the old Minecraft launcher that didn’t have auto updating or having sane amounts of bloats or eyecandy. I was still able to login to my Mojang accounts and play on Minecraft servers all the way into 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 Minecraft accounts, except for this one…

So from here on out, this account is essentially unusable. Then starting on Sep 1, and continuing over the course of 8 months, I got 3 more reminder E-Mails that were identical to the last one. Then on May 17, 2023, I received another E-Mail announcing the last state to migrate was on Sep. 19, 2023. That marked the official deadline to where I were not be able to migrate my account after that date. Just 9 days before the final day, I got 1 final E-Mail reminder saying it was time to migrate. Nope, not gonna happen.

The day has come. Migrations to Microsoft accounts have officially ended. Except surprisingly, Mojang very graciously give us hold outs 90 extra days to give us new copies of Minecraft. Now 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 ignored migrating my account, but I also missed the time period to claim a new Minecraft account. But, I’m not gonna end the experiment so soon. I wanted to see if it’s still possible after all of this to somehow get my account back or at lease get a new copy of the game. So I decided to contact Minecraft support making sure I include my order and transaction ID to see if they were able to restore my account at this time. And of course, I instantly received an automated response saying that any support ticket after Sep. 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 URL for some reason. Basically its something that lots of big companies in the US put in their end user contracts. That forces users to settle disputes out of courts with their arbitrators instead of you suing them. But unfortunately arbitration usually costs money, way more than the $26.95 I paid for this Minecraft account. So that’s where this paragraph comes in to play. I had the option to mail a notice of dispute to Microsoft. All I had to do was tell them what the problem is and what I want. Sounds simple enough? So I wrote a brief message and gave them 3 options: let me migrate my account, give me a new Minecraft account free of charge, or refund my $26.95 I originally paid for it. I also include my original copy of the receipt for good measure. Now it was off to the post office.

I got an E-Mail 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 cooperate response. Telling me that the migration period had ended. And 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 obvious 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 orginal response in this letter. So I ended up writing this response to that. 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 deserved to have something they paid for and expected to keep be taken away from them like this.

I’m pretty sure that there’re thousands possibly hundreds of thousands of Minecraft accounts that never just got migrated that are now lost forever. Just reading the most recent comments of the original migration announcement video shows other users’ frustration 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 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 re-buy 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 allow you to migrate it to a Google accuont. 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, thats 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.

Video created by SalC1