Microsoft pulled the account verification trick with Minecraft after forced account migration a few years back, locking accounts and forcing customers to verify mobile phone number to even launch the game.
If you want to play something minecraft-like, Luanti (VoxeLibre) is really excellent. I play it with my child, and it's indistinguishable from 'real Minecraft'.
In the most minor defense of the devil: with Minecraft, you have a substantial audience who is underage, the game features multiplayer heavily, and I don't think it's the worst idea ever to have verified accounts there.
True, though whether you play on any servers or not does not seem to be relevant to Microsoft’s process. Also, it works the other way too, in that Microsoft would be collecting information of children who are presumably the majority of players.
Yea, that was a major pain. I had a Mojang account since basically day one when the Minecraft beta came out and then over 10 years later I want to boot up the game to play with some friends for nostalgia and my account no longer works.
That was a real scumbag move. Thankfully its easy AF to "pirate" Minecraft by simply commenting out account verification in a 3rd party launcher. But I will never forgive Microsoft for stealing my account with that dirty trick.
