Time to sue for breach of contract. My original agreement with Mojang which Microsoft bought is forever.
And if you bought in alpha, it is for “every future version” of Minecraft. I made it into that group by like a week.
If Microsoft wants to keep profiting off of Minecraft’s name, then they are making “future versions” and they need to honour that. They don’t want to do that? Okay, call it “shitty block building game rip-off #15,084,831”. But they won’t, because that name is valuable for good reason.
It would cost them literally nothing and gain massive goodwill to give that out to like the tiny minority of early players, many of whom won’t even use it, but something about being a corporation makes it impossible for them to do literally anything good. It’s frankly baffling.
Friendly, and unsolicited reminder that the Minetest engine + its game Mineclonia (or alternatively Voxelibre) are a pretty good open source alternative as of late.
Minetest is also getting some pretty nice upgrades to its graphics lately. The upcoming release should be looking quite pretty.I’m very surprised by the discourse in this thread. I understand that people were given lots of warning, but that doesn’t excuse that they just had their purchase recinded. Why not just allow download of an old version of Minecraft Java still?
I’d consider myself a Microsoft fanboy as I’ve had Xbox live for nearly 2 decades and Game Pass since it came into existence. Removing people’s purchases for any reason is a scummy move.
I lost my Minecraft account to this, but that’s because the email address I bought the game with was with Lavabit, and thus never was able to receive any of the emails. Couldn’t verify I owned it either because again, no access to the email address.
I was just a kid when I signed up for that Lavabit address sometime in the 2000s, a kid who was vaguely interested in the idea of privacy and software freedom (I used PPC Ubuntu on a G3 iBook btw). Bought Minecraft Alpha in 2010 for €10. Now because of time passing and some bullshit happening I don’t have access to any of it.
But tbh I never opened a support ticket or anything, because fuck Microsoft. Its the principle of the whole thing
we shouldn’t have had to transition but if you didn’t know they were doing this then you probably haven’t tried to play the game within the last 5 years
I’m one of those people. I haven’t played in years. I may never have played again. I only found out because my daughter is now at an age where she asked if we could play together. I received no notice from Microsoft and I don’t do social media so it was a complete surprise to me when I couldn’t log in, then find out through their support that I had lost access to something I had legally paid for.
I believe that you didn’t receive any notices, but I think that’s an exception rather than the rule, there was probably something wrong going off on their side. I personally received several emails, they were getting kinda annoying, to be honest.
I sincerely doubt you received no notice from Microsoft. I received multiple emails from them, even though I didn’t play back then. If I hadn’t transitioned I’m pretty sure they would’ve kept sending me emails.
I got no notice. I’ve got an alpha account.
I got so many emails from them telling me to transition the account or I would lose it. So they did give lots of notice.
Even tho it sucks losing access, it’s still a great game worth every penny
So did most of my friends, but I checked multiple times and confirmed that I had nothing. I would have been a lot less annoyed with them if I had received an email and missed or ignored it. For whatever reason, the notifications never made it to me.
Probably spam filter? I remember consciously ignoring them for over a year until I finally gave in and converted.
A search in Gmail (which that used) finds stuff on spam. Also Gmail won’t put a Microsoft company’s mail in spam
Also Gmail won’t put a Microsoft company’s mail in spam
I highly doubt that’s true. I have gmail, and it puts official stuff in spam all the time.
Official stuff, sure, but not system generated email from giant companies like Microsoft
That happened to my sister unfortunately. She tried to transition her account and kept getting strange errors and minecraft support was very unhelpful. I ended up buying her a new account for her birthday, which I’m glad we can play together again, but it sucks that some strange bug took her account in the first place.
It wasn’t the big, it was Microsoft. They forced the transition and refused to solve the issue you faced.
What’s fucked up is they still have a custom skin my ex made for me on my account, but I don’t own the game.
Not to Pirate, (i own the Java version since 2015~)but is there a way to have a minecraft executable that runs localy and never connects to microsoft/internet? I know minetest exists, have made a world there a while ago, but its ever so slightly diffrent
The official Minecraft server .jars (and all the modded ones) can be configured to not check in with Microsoft. The game itself can be launched in offline mode too. Might be easier to get it set up with a 3rd party launcher instead of the official one.
I paid for Minecraft more times than any other game. If there’s a free way to play it, I do feel entitled to that.
I have gotten more free accounts on Minecraft than any other game. I bought it twice on Java (not counting copies I bought for family) and once on bedrock, so when they moved accounts to Microsoft and gave every Java account a bedrock account and every bedrock account a Java account, so I now have three on each version. A second (or third) account is useful for rescuing your main account in some circumstances
As much as I think it’s a shitty move, they warned about it for long enough, and they can’t be expected to maintain a deprecated login system indefinitely.
I don’t know if I migrated my account though, but since I only play on self hosted servers I don’t care, worst case scenario I’ll crack it to not need a login and be done with it.
What do you mean, they warned about it long enough? I bought it, I played it as a kid. Now I want to share it with my kids and it turns out Microsoft said on some website somewhere, and maybe in a few emails to a nonexistent aol address, that they want me to update my account, and since I didn’t do that I have to buy it a second time? I learned today that they’ve “attempted to contact me”. I never agreed to a EULA that said I had a limited amount of time for anything. Nor did anyone else who purchased before 2011.
I bought it before 2011, technically if you lost access to the email you might have lost access to that account years ago without knowing. Even if Microsoft was doing what I think they should, i.e. keep a database of emails and allow people to migrate their account forever, you would still not be able to recover it. Wanting to get an account back from an email you lost access to is like expecting steam to give you all of the keys on your account to add to another if you forgot your password and can’t prove it is you.
Forgot about replying but I’m begging y’all to stop coming up with reasons this isn’t an issue, I have proof of purchase on an old hard drive and my username and password worked til the day I stopped playing. Very quickly googled and support used to help people migrate accounts with no email access, so yes authenticating a login on the server was plenty for them, just not anymore. Comparison doesn’t work
If you lost access to the email and forgot the password you can’t demonstrate to the support person that you are who you say you are. If support people changed your password under those conditions then the system could be abused to reset random people’s passwords. Also you don’t know if your username/password still worked, if those credentials were leaked anyone could have changed your password, and Minecraft old auth system leaked a few username/passwords, I remember having a list of them that I used to introduce people to the game (obviously I never changed anyone’s password, but there are plenty of douchebags out there)
BTW I never said this isn’t an issue, IMO they should keep a DB and allow the migration indefinitely, so it is shitty of them to put a time limit on it. But if you lost access to the email for that account I can understand them not allowing the migration, part of activating an account is usually validating the email address, so whoever owns your email address now gets to own that account.
???
and forgot the password
Made-up scenario.
So take MS to small claims court. Get an order for them to restore your account and user name per the licence you presumably still have a copy of
While I agree it’s awful, there were numerous news articles since Microsoft bought Mojang about it. I haven’t played Minecraft since I was a kid (my kids use my account) and I was aware of it long before it was required. Basically, they supported both for a few years, then only supported Microsoft logins but kept the Mojang login to convert accounts for a few years, and now they’re disabling the Mojang login entirely.
They’ve handled this about as well as I could hope for. They bought Mojang ~10 years ago, and I remember converting my account like 3-4 years ago after putting it off for a year or so.
So 10 years from aquisition to disabling the old login servers is quite generous imo. I’ve been using the same Minecraft license since I bought it ~15 years ago (2009/2010, whenever it was in open beta). That’s a pretty good run. That’s pretty good for a constantly upgdating game.
It sucks that some people lost their accounts, but aside from a handful like you, I’m guessing most of those aren’t interested in ever playing again, so the impact is low. Hopefully their support can do something for you.
Their support will do nothing. My oldest daughter tried to play on her account after not playing on it for probably five years. She found out that she missed the conversion and we had to buy it again for her. Really sucks that they can just decide to do things like this. Should have unlimited time to convert- not log in and play on the old system but they could have kept a list of accounts at trivial cost.
Yeah, it really does suck. But I’m guessing the majority are unaffected, so it’s way better than other transitions. I’ve had the same account since buying way back in 2009/2010, that’s a pretty good run imo.
Sorry about your daughter’s account.
I “transitioned” to Vintage Story anyway.
Thanks for the heads up on that game. Looks fun!
It’s basically TerraFirmaCraft, but as a standalone game, if you ever played that mod.
I mean, there are open-source clones, right, like Minetest, yes?
The angry Redditor wrote, “The fact they can just take away your license to the game like that is [expletive] insane. This is why I’ll never support DRMs, if a game has a DRM you do NOT own it. Only a license to temporarily play it.”
I mean, I get that complaint on a broader basis – and I think that that might be a problem moving down the line. If a company can buy a company that has sold you access to a game, and that company can cut off your access to that game, then they get leverage that they can use to extract other things out of you. Like, that is a real, legitimate issue. And it applies to anything that you buy digitally, not just games – books, music, software packages. If a vendor can change the terms on which you have access to the thing, they have ongoing leverage over the customer, and at some point, if a game isn’t generating an ongoing revenue stream, I can definitely imagine someone thinking “I can monetize this leverage”.
However, specifically for Minecraft, it seems kind of like complaining that someone is cutting off your access to Microsoft Solitaire. It might be annoying, but…you can go out and download a free and open-source package that can do essentially the same thing, yes?
No one wants to play Minecraft, they want to play dragons reloaded two, or harvestcraft, or whatever. Minecraft is really kinda bad as a stand alone thing, that’s why people will still get excited when they hear the name hytale. The modding community is what people buy the game for, and that isn’t replicated anywhere else.
Hard disagree, of i play Minecraft, it’s for vanilla Minecraft. Clones just don’t capture that arm feel and vibe of Minecraft either
still sucks but I mean they did warn about this for propably over 2 years
Okay, but breach of contract isn’t okay just because you announced you were going to do it well in advance. It just makes their culpability easier to prove because they announced their unlawful intentions extremely clearly.
I haven’t read into this but do you have actual proof that it was unlawful in any way? this is no different from game servers and websites shutting down and it happens all the time
Well then read into it if you want to make pronouncements about it. It is the revocation of a license that was sold in perpetuity. That is quite different to no longer providing a service in general. It is selectively denying service to a certain group without legal cause. There were no terms in the contract with Mojang that they could unilaterally remove the license if you didn’t do a specific digital dance on their terms. If it is unlawful, the lawsuit will determine that.
And my point is that if it is indeed unlawful, then telling people years in advance makes no difference, especially if, in some cases mentioned in this very thread, people tried to transfer and couldn’t and were given no way to fix it.
One Reddit thread warrants a whole article? Is this what journalism is today?
Always has been.
I’m not sure I understand. As recently as a few years ago, it was common to find high quality long-form articles on just about any subject linked from your favorite subreddits/tweeters/etc. Now, it seems like the majority of “news” articles I come across are vapid, two paragraph, summaries of a Reddit post or Twitter thread, that don’t anything substantive of their own. I mean, yeah you could find a lot of that 5 years ago too, but now it’s hard to find anything else. It wasn’t that long ago that we had newspapers and magazines, both online and offline, that were actually known for hard-hitting, in-depth journalism. Then they all got sold to companies like Meredith and Conde Nast and have become nothing but thinly veiled advertising. I guess my point is that it hasn’t always been that way, and it doesn’t have to be that way now.
I am against DRM just like everyone else but trust me they tried. They emailed me constantly telling me to move the account. There has to be some personal responsibility right?
If your mad it’s your own fault you had 3 years
These people had years to migrate their accounts, were told to migrate their accounts, and warned to migrate their accounts because the old mojang auth system is insecure and needs to be sunsetted, and when it does, they will lose access.
They sat there and played the “no, I won’t move” game, and now they’re upset because the thing they were told for years would happen happened.
And they would have had to have no social interaction with any minecraft player on any online platform and in real life in all those years, as well as ignore every email from mojang, never look at the minecraft website, and so on, to not be notified.
I bought Minecraft when it was first purchaseable. Only converted my account last month as my new-school-entrant kid has asked what it is.
And honestly, I wish I didn’t. The MS launcher is an absolute shit show in usability for adults, let alone kids. Next time it forces me to log back in I’m just pirating it.
I bought two copies, I’ll fucking run them how I please.
I’m amazed at how much better the official launcher is on Linux than on windows.
Windows:
- complains if your logged in account doesn’t match your game account
- Requires you to log out of one account to log into another in a not very clear or user friendly way
Linux
- No logged in account to complain about
- Lists all your accounts and lets you swap by clicking on the one you want in the accounts list
