I DIDN’T Migrate my Minecraft Account - Here’s What Happened

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