Parents, never gift Minecraft to your kids: my misadventure with Microsoft family

My two kids birthdays are both next month and one has been talking about Minecraft non-stop. His friends play, he loves the movie, I even got him some Minecraft comics which he would not put down for weeks. Minecraft was on sale, I thought it was time. I spent a couple days googling “cheapest way to run 24/7 Minecraft server”, I want all of us to be in on this!

First, some background about myself. I grew up with computers in the 90s. I've built my own computers since the early 2000s. I work in tech. I have 500 games on my steam account from when Humble Bundle used to sell 20 for a buck. I am not, at all, new at this.

On Sunday, the first thing I did was get Minecraft for me, my wife, and our two gaming buddies. So far, so good.

Then, I googled about how to gift Minecraft for my kids (https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/26602043483405). I set up gmail accounts and Microsoft family sharing.

Microsoft family sharing is trash

A little more about me. I try really hard to keep things on the up and up. I used to sail the seven seas, but after I’ve been working for a while I try to support developers. I even have a receipt for a WinRAR license purchase that I used to pull out for people to laugh at. I really wanted to do things how MS told me to. I've previously purchased Windows 11 and Office with this account.

I thought about lying about their ages, and giving them non-family accounts, but thought it wouldn't matter too much. Boy, was I ever fucking wrong about that.

Later that day, I tried to buy Minecraft on my son’s account. It requested me to request and purchase on my parent account. Okay, fine. But it failed. That's weird, it worked earlier. I retried, and it failed again. I thought it may have been a card issue, so I switched cards. It failed. I thought it may have been an issue with all credit cards, so I added my Venmo account. That failed. My account was locked. I tried again, but contacted support after it failed. I could no longer unlock my account myself.

The first thing I tried was online support. Did you know that you can’t contact online support if you can’t log in? Now you do! If that was the only issue I wouldn't be here, though. After racking my brain I finally figured out I could log into my son’s account and ask about my main account. Support had me try a bunch of different things to unlock my account, but it all failed, and they told me to try again in 24 hours.

I was a little upset at this point. Little did I know what was coming.

I tried again a few times after a day. My account was locked AGAIN without the unlock option. I then contacted phone support. This will definitely work, I’m dealing with a real person! The person on the line tried, I assume, their best, all while trying to sell me an Xbox game pass trial a bunch of times. I finally said okay, you can sign me up for $1, if the purchase even worked. It did not work (honestly lol). One of the things that we figured was that we could try raising the age of our child accounts so that they could be gifted Minecraft by a third person – my wife. However, they said that they couldn’t unlock my account but would escalate to account support. Ok, I thought. I was able to purchase for my son and left it at that, waiting for my account to be unlocked. Definitely no way my account gets locked, I didn’t do anything except try to buy Minecraft a bunch of times for my friends and family 🙂

My account gets locked

I got the good news the next day:

“I hope this message finds you well. I wanted to follow up regarding your purchasing issue. After escalation, the issue has been resolved, and you should now be able to make purchases on your account without any problems.

If you need any further assistance, please feel free to reply to this email.”

Great! I thought. Everyone has a copy except my daughter, I’m going to go ahead and gift her a copy.

Account locked.

Um, okay that’s strange. I tried again and couldn’t even get past the captcha. I tried purchasing from my wife’s account, and she started to get the same failure warnings I did. I tried purchasing from my daughter’s account – needs a parent’s permission. The other guy didn't raise my daughter's age! But the parent also can’t login!

I called support AGAIN. After being transferred, support finally told me to fill out an account appeal form. I said okay but kinda scoffed – what did I do wrong other than trying to buy Minecraft for my kids?

“Hello,
We're following up on your service request.
We have reviewed this account and confirmed that due to suspicious activity, this customer will not be permitted to make purchases on the Microsoft platform. 
we are unable to provide any further help with this matter
 
Kind regards
Abdelkarim”

I’m just so sad and tired and frustrated. It’s 5:00 am here. I'm the carpool driver tomorrow. I’m supposed to be worrying about my kids and my job, not my Microsoft account. I have no idea if I can log into my Microsoft account later. I have no idea if I can play Minecraft with my kid. I have no idea if my wife or kids accounts are flagged. I’m worried I fucked her account too.

If I had to do it all over, I’d give my friends 25 bucks on Venmo and tell them to get it themselves, then set up non-family accounts for my kids. I just wanted to play Minecraft with my kids and I don't even know how to do that now 🙁

tl;dr:

Do not gift Minecraft. Send anyone you want to have Minecraft 25 bucks then tell them to buy it themselves. Do not set up family sharing. Set up individual accounts, and MOST DEFINITELY lie and make your kids 18. Listen to me and other warnings (https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/1ct8rci/buying_minecraft_for_a_young_person_is_needlessly/).

Do not trust Microsoft. Microsoft support cannot help you, once you are flagged, they’ll try to help, but eventually will redirect you and someone will probably tell you that you are fucked a day later. I hate Microsoft.