The CraftBukkit DMCA notice Primary
The actual takedown notice as filed, hosted in GitHub’s public DMCA repository, September 2014. The single best-documented event in the video.
Video source notes
Nobody quits Minecraft.
They build a way around.
Every controversy in this video has a primary document behind it. Only one of them removed players who wanted to stay, and nobody has ever published how many.
The measurable parts
Four numbers that anchor eleven years.
The current monthly-player figure is third-party estimate — Mojang stopped publishing after 2021- 141M
- last monthly figure Mojang published (2021)
- 350M
- copies sold
- 118M+
- No Chat Reports downloads, CurseForge alone
- 19 Sep 2023
- migration deadline
The core idea
Mojang has never lost a fight over whether people keep playing. It has lost almost every fight over how.
The 2014 commercial guidelines are the origin of the distrust: servers could no longer sell gameplay advantages, and businesses built on paid kits had weeks to become something else. In the same window Bukkit — the plugin layer almost every server ran on — came apart, when a contributor filed a DMCA notice over GPL-incompatible code and the whole thing was pulled. That notice is public, filed and dated, and it is the strongest single document in this video.
Then the pattern repeats. The 1.9 attack cooldown split the PvP community, and instead of leaving it froze: servers kept the old combat, clients were built to make the old version run well, and people are still playing a version from 2016. Update Aquatic’s block rewrite made large servers unplayable on Mojang’s own server software, so the community replaced the software. Chat reporting produced a mod whose only purpose is to switch it off — and Mojang itself shipped a server setting that does the same thing.
“They did not quit Minecraft. They quit time. They froze it.”
Only the Microsoft account migration removed people involuntarily. The deadline was 19 September 2023; after it, unmigrated accounts could no longer sign in to migrate, and support had stopped assisting two weeks earlier. Everyone in that group paid for the game and cannot open it. Nobody has published a number, and the video declines to invent one.
The mob vote is the counter-example the video keeps: sustained pressure, hundreds of thousands of petition signatures, and in September 2024 Mojang ended it.
Primary documents
The filings, the rules, the deadlines.
github/dmca ↗
Commercial usage guidelines Primary
Mojang’s own rules for servers — the prohibition on selling anything that gives a competitive gameplay advantage, the rule that ended the paid-kit business model.
Java account migration Primary
The migration requirement, the extensions, and the consequence of missing it: unmigrated accounts can no longer sign in, and migration is no longer possible.
“Mojang Account migration completed” Primary
Mojang’s own last-call and completion notice for the migration.
No Chat Reports Primary
The mod itself, with its public download total — over 118 million on CurseForge alone. Its entire purpose is disabling a feature Mojang shipped.
No Chat Reports on Modrinth Primary
Second distribution platform, with its own independent download count.
Reporting and figures
Where the numbers come from.
141 million monthly players Secondary
Coverage of Minecraft Live 2021, the last time Mojang published a monthly active figure itself. Everything after is third-party estimate.
Total unit sales Secondary
Sales tracking behind the 350-million figure.
The mob vote is scrapped Secondary
Reporting on the September 2024 decision to end the mob vote, and the vote-fixing allegations that preceded it.
The anti-mob-vote petition Secondary
Contemporary coverage of the petition passing 300,000 signatures; it later exceeded half a million.
Players celebrate the end of the mob vote Secondary
Second outlet on the same decision, used to corroborate the date and framing.
The community’s workarounds
Evidence that people routed around it.
The argument of the video is that the community responded by building alternatives rather than leaving. These are the alternatives.
1.9 — “The Combat Update” Secondary
Contemporary community reaction to the attack cooldown on the largest server’s own forum, and the later threads about disabling it.
Disabling the 1.9 cooldown Secondary
How large servers kept old-combat behaviour for players on newer versions — the mechanism behind the permanent split.
Paper Primary
The community server software that most large servers run instead of Mojang’s, written to make big multiplayer worlds performant.
Servers that closed after the EULA change Secondary
A creator’s thread collecting servers that shut down after 2014, including MCPvP — the bridge to our MCPvP episode.
Conflict log · what the sources dispute
Where the sources disagree.
Two figures in the video are conservative and one is an estimate that should never be quoted as Mojang’s.
| Claim | What the video says | What the sources say | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Current monthly players | “around 200 million”, flagged as an estimate | Mojang last published 141M in 2021 and stopped | Estimate, labelled. Never attributed to Mojang. |
| No Chat Reports downloads | “tens of millions” | over 118 million on CurseForge alone, plus Modrinth | The video undercounts. The higher figure is the correct one. |
| Petition signatures | “hundreds of thousands” | 300,000+ in the first days; 534,000+ by the end | Correct as stated; the final total is higher. |
| Migration exodus size | no number given | nobody has published one | Deliberately left blank rather than estimated. |
| Who ended Bukkit | a developer who had worked on it | the notice names the contributor who filed it; Mojang had owned the project | Both true. The filing is public and dated. |
The graph in the video is assembled from third-party estimates for every year after 2021. It is used to show a shape — no dip at any controversy — not to assert a precise player count in any given month.