this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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> be me
> 20 years old when Minecraft Alpha is released, buy it in Alpha to get all future updates
> feel like playing recently
> sold to Microsoft and they deleted my account
I hate you Microsoft
I was always wondering about this. Also had an alpha account, assumed it ended after the sale. Sad to see it confirmed ๐
They had a long time period where you could port your mojang account to a Microsoft account, but eventually they shutdown the mojang authentication.
Yeah there was at least a year where you could port it, I got it in alpha too and still play every so often
It was a year long period that was extended for two more years and change, 2020-2023.
As much as "fuck Microsoft" in general, 3 years seem fair in this case.
Shouldn't have been done this way. They could have migrated everyone's accounts. They did this so people would miss the emails or completely forget. So they'd have to buy it again if they came back to play it.
Really? The total time period for migrating the account was something like 3 years, they sent emails reminding you about it, and mentioned it in the launcher. I don't know what else they could have been expected to do?
They couldn't just "migrate everyone's accounts" because there's no obvious way to do that. Simple example: Let's say you bought Minecraft for yourself and your two kids so you could play together. These were little kids, and Mojang accounts aren't uniquely tied to an email address so they all have the same email address. MS accounts use email address as username. Without asking the user, which of the three accounts gets tied to that email address, and what happens to the other two? What about cases where the Mojang account is for an email address that doesn't have a Microsoft account? What if it already does, but the email address on the Mojang account is an older email they no longer use or even have access to and just never bothered to update because the email on your Mojang account was only really relevant to recover your password? Etc, etc, etc.
I think forcing people to have a Microsoft account is the underlying issue there. I see no reason why they couldn't have allowed users to have an ms account and then just have the Minecraft account be a link to either a ms account or a standard mojang account.
I think they just wanted more personal data and ms accounts to gloat about to shareholders.
As soon as MS bought it, I think everyone could see it moving to an MS account as an obvious next step. MS had been building themselves up as a gaming brand for years and running two separate authentication services is going to seem like an unnecessary cost to their bean counters.
What? No it's not hard to do, all they had to do was port the info into a DB and sit on it...they could have used the same DB that they use for the accounts now. Then the second someone returns it kicks off the same process that happened when this whole migration thing began long time ago. I've handled plenty of account migrations throughout my time and they're not rocket science.
That is not how databases work.
It would cause all kinds of issues. And then they would get tons of criticism by people like you that it doesn't work perfectly.
Windows has enough backwards compatibility they have to work around. Lets not add games to it as well.
No, 3 years of free upgrades is more than enough.
Lol that's exactly how DBs work. The hell do you think they keep account info? On randys note pad?
People paid for the game. Period. This is like someone buying a physical copy and because they didn't go and get the new copy the old one stops working.
Some simps for Microsoft here apparently.
I kinda doubt it. That is such an insignificant amount of money to Microsoft, I doubt they'd do it for that reason. It probably has something to do with conforming to regulations or something random.
What regulations say you have to basically steal someone's access to a game they paid for?
There are many regulations in place that have to do with privacy, terms of service etc. When you made a Mojang account you never agreed to Microsoft's terms of service. And I wouldn't be surprised if there were other issues as well related to just merging accounts from different companies, it's not that simple.
If I remember correctly I think Luke and Linus (from LTT) talked about how they had a lot of issues with migrating forum subscribers to Floatplane and how it wasn't really possible to do it without direct user consent or something. I don't really remember the details, it was many years ago.
They didn't steal anything. They gave you 3 years to upgrade for free.
If you didn't do it in time then that is on you. They send reminders in every way they could.
"upgrade"
And they are taking it away. If they didn't have the EULA which I believe they had to change to make it possible (or they changed it for another reason) it would be theft.
You know how many people change their email addresses or stop using them in a few years time?
This is stealing, people paid for a product and it was removed from their access. I don't know how much clearer that can be.