In 2020, Mojang made an announcement
that they were going to migrate all
Mojang/Legacy Java Edition
Minecraft accounts to Microsoft accounts
And 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
(Introduction Music)
You heard that right
I bought a new Mojang account
just to sacrifice it to the Microsoft
overlords
So, let's set the timeline here
On September 2014
when Microsoft bought Mojang
for $2.5 billion dollars
For the next six 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
from Microsoft's wrath
the official announcement was made
about merging Mojang accounts
to Microsoft accounts
Now, after this announcement
there was a period where users
were still able to create
new Mojang accounts
So, three days later
That's exactly what I did
And with this email
of my receipts sent to me
on October 24th, 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 31st, 2021
came and went
and still no migration
3 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
to migrating my Mojang accounts
to Microsoft
They're a big company that
collects a lot of user data
and had 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
And not surprisingly,
people didn't take much notice to 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 18th, 2022
I received my first actual email
from Mojang about account migration
They said, starting on March 10
users would no longer be able
to log into 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 have insane amounts of
bloats 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
So, from here on out
this account was essentially unusable
Then starting on September 1st,
and continuing over the course
of 8 months
I got three more reminder emails
that were identical to the last one
Then on May 17th, 2023,
I received another email
announcing the last day to migrate
was on September 19, 2023
That marked the official deadline
to where I would not be able to
migrate my accounts after that date
Just 9 days before the final day
I got one final email reminder
saying it was time to migrate
Nope, not gonna happen
The day has come
migrations to Microsoft accounts
have officially ended
Except suprisingly,
Mojang very graciously
gave us hold outs
90 extra days
to give us new copies of Minecraft
Now, this was a turning point for me