[fbdab103]

  Nah. Microsoft did a great job handling Minecraft imo.

I am still peeved that my lifetime license "mysteriously" broke during Microsoft's account transitions. Trillion dollar company lacks the manpower and technical capability to handle it? Or someone cannot be arsed to maintain "freeloader" customers.

[herbst]

Same here. Had one of the first few thousand accounts. Since Microsoft took over:

- it got hacked. Got it back but name was changed, history not perfect anymore

- much later somehow lost my account due to me trying to keep my old account I guess. Whatever I wasnt noticed that my account is going to die. It just did. Microsoft support also never answered to my request getting it back

- Never played Minecraft again

[strogonoff]

Microsoft’s bean counters immediately set about milking as much profit from Minecraft as they can right after the purchase, be through Minecoin, premium skins, or by collecting PII via requiring phone numbers from everyone for “SMS verification” due to “security alert” blackmail (total joke—the attacker could just as well provide their own phone number and lock me out—except, of course, there is no actual suspicious activity: my account was never hacked, and I was not playing for years).

It was the first game I bought in my life, and 30 EUR was quite a chunk of change. Since the acquisition, it stopped being a game I have; it is now a game that Microsoft may or may not let me play. As a result, I don’t bother.

[trinix912]

They did provide several notices regarding that years in advance to shutting down the old auth servers and also had a long migration period during which you could log in with both accounts (assuming you have migrated the old account to Xbox/Microsoft).

The whole reason they did it is that you can now easily switch between Java and Bedrock, and that it's not as laughably easy to hack accounts as it used to be.

[hot_gril]

Their notices required you to re-verify your original email address, which so far has never been required. So lots of people (myself included) had their passwords and could play fine, never mind the 10-year-old @aol.com account tied to it, and could do nothing but watch that deadline approach before being locked out.

[kenmorechalfant]

Oh man, I guess I was so angry about that at some point I blocked it out. My dumb ass actually bought a 2nd account because I couldn't convince my friends to play with me until it was free. After MSFT purchased Minecraft I could never recover either of those accounts!

[Version467]

Yeah, that's fair. That was just a shitty thing to do. I was more focusing on the creative development that Minecraft saw under Microsoft.

Fandoms are often extremely nervous when a large corporation buys the rights to a beloved media ip, largely because this has gone wrong so many times, with poor adaptions or obvious cashgrabs milking a property until the fanbase turns away.

This really hasn't happened to Minecraft. It grew further in popularity, even though it was already massively popular at the time and it did it mostly without driving away the existing fans. That in itself is quite unusual (I think) and definitely not what I would have expected. At the time I really thought that the sale would mark the beginning of Minecraft's slow descent into irrelevancy and I definitely remember that being a fairly common sentiment.

But I fully understand people being mad at the license issues you mention. They should be. Might not have been illegal, but that was essentially theft.

[hot_gril]

I was at least ambivalent about a lot of the changes, but the combat update did ruin things.