Minecraft players outraged as Microsoft deletes accounts that weren't transitioned

Microsoft has fueled outrage among many gamers by deleting their old Mojang Minecraft accounts. The deletions came because the gamers neglected to migrate their accounts from old Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts.

After Microsoft purchased Mojang (and, naturally, Minecraft), it announced that legacy Minecraft and Minecraft: Java Edition owners would need to migrate their accounts to Microsoft accounts. The migration process began in October 2020 and was originally scheduled to be finished by March 2022. Microsoft extended that cutoff date to Sept. 19, 2023.

What happened to accounts that weren’t migrated in time? According to Microsoft’s web page and emails to Mojang account. holders, they would not be able to sign in to Minecraft.net or the Minecraft launcher. Eventually, the accounts would be deleted.

Even before deletion, though, Microsoft advised gamers it would be unable to continue account migration after Sept. 19, 2023. That date was declared as the final cutoff date, but many players claim they were not notified. Microsoft wanted to get all Minecraft players onto its own servers for better security and access to new features.

This means if you didn’t migrate your account and want to start playing Minecraft again, you have to purchase a new license. This has many gamers understandably upset. Thousands have turned to Reddit to express their outrage, including one who insists they’ll just pirate every Minefield game from now on, along with the upcoming Starfield expansion and Elder Scrolls VI.

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.”

The post drew 1,100 comments before moderators locked the post.

"Comments locked because it's just a battle of the 'this was an easy thing to do and you had plenty of warning' crowd VS 'you should be able to keep the game no matter what if you paid for it' crowd," the moderator wrote.

Many of the commenters commiserated with the original poster, but seemingly just as many offered no sympathy. They pointed out the migration had been ongoing for years and that Microsoft gave more than 12 months’ notice of the looming deadline.