Extracurricular: The Hidden Value of Minecraft Accounts
A discussion of rare Minecraft accounts and my personal experience owning one.
Welcome back to The Report Card. It’s been a while since I picked up the ol’ keyboard and got to writing, but a recent combination of free time and a strange personal experience brought me back from the dead. I’ll get to more about why I’ve been gone and what I want to do with The Report Card moving forward at the end of the article, but for now, let’s get into the interesting topic of Minecraft accounts and their value.
The Basics
Minecraft is one of the most popular video games of all time. Ask your grandpa, ask your mother, hell, even ask a member of an Amazonian tribe and they’ll all at least recognize the name (okay, maybe not the Amazonian, but you get the point). Minecraft is quite literally the best-selling video game of all time. As of the time of writing, the game has surpassed 300 million sales and still has an extremely active player base. Despite being released in 2009, the game continues to receive constant updates, and it doesn’t look like its enduring popularity will fade anytime soon.
Minecraft is a survival sandbox game on it’s surface, but to describe it only as that would be disrespectful. However, I don’t want to go too in-depth into the game itself, as our main topic today has to do with the accounts associated with the game.
In case you don’t know, when Minecraft first launched, you were required to set-up a Mojang account. Mojang, the developers of the game, didn’t put it on Steam or anything like that, so you had to create an account and then purchase the game through their website. In 2014, Microsoft bought Minecraft, forcing Mojang-account holders to migrate to a Microsoft account. Nowadays you can purchase Minecraft on the Windows store, as well as on the official Minecraft website, for $29.99. The interesting thing is that, despite the number of Minecraft accounts exceeding 300 million, some are much more valuable than $29.99.
The Value
Minecraft accounts can be worth more than the initial price of the game for a couple different reasons. One of those reasons is a high rank/ status or the possession of valuable items on the game’s biggest community-run server, Hypixel. Since I partake primarily in single-player gameplay, I don’t really know what all the hubbub around this stuff is, nor do I understand any of the lingo. But some Hypixel accounts for sale range from $15 to $1,150 on one website I found. I’m sure that if the account is really juiced, the value can skyrocket even higher.
But the more common indicator of a Minecraft account’s value, and the main topic of today’s article, is capes.
A cape is a cosmetic for your Minecraft character that is linked to your account. In a way, it reminds me of an NFT, but instead of being cringe and useless, it’s actually cool. A fresh Minecraft account will not have a cape associated with it, and until you attend a specific event or perform a specific action, you will not obtain one. For example, let’s say you bought a Minecraft account before Microsoft acquired the game, and then you migrated your account over to a Microsoft account afterwards. Your account would automatically be awarded a “Migrator” cape, which you can see on the very top left of the graphic above. The Migrator is the most common cape, owned by about five million players. A Migrator cape might raise the value of your account by a small amount, but not by much. For example, one account with the two most common capes, Migrator and Vanilla, is going for $15.99 on a super shady site. It actually costs less than the game itself, so I’m assuming it was either hacked or it’s a total scam.
Once you get to some of the rarer capes, we start talking about some serious dough. Some of the capes verge on priceless, like those in the “Epic” category in the graphic. These capes are owned by only a handful of people, with a few being owned by just one person. As a result, there’s not really a way to estimate their cost, but I’ll just throw out a number: $15,000. Yep, that’s right. And that’s a very conservative estimate. If one of these people decided to sell their “Epic” cape, I’m betting that a serious collector would easily pay more than that. And, the thing is, as the game ages and the amount of accounts increase, capes will only appreciate in value.
The “Ultra-Rare” category contains some more valuable capes, but most of those were given to Mojang employees, and I don’t think the company would be too happy with those being sold, so we can’t really talk about those either.
The capes that we can actually make some real prices estimates on are in the “Rare” category. In here, we have all of the Minecon capes. Back in the day, Mojang would host a convention called Minecon, which was similar to Comic Con but obviously much smaller and more niche. If you were to attend Minecon, your associated Minecraft account would a receive a cape to mark the occasion. The most recent Minecon was hosted in 2016, and about seven thousand players received that cape. The first Minecon, Minecon 2011, also awarded capes to every attendee, making it the first publicly available cape. But since the game wasn’t even fully released yet, and the number of fans was much smaller than it is now, only around 3.5 thousand people got their hands on that specific cape.
I am one of those people.
My Experience
That’s right. When I was around 11 years old, I attended Minecon 2011 in Las Vegas and received one of the rarest capes in the game. While the estimated amount of owners is around 3.5 thousand, it could easily be less than that. For example, when I was entering my dad’s Minecraft account name when signing up for Minecon, I made a capitalization error. As a result, his account did not receive the cape (sorry dad). Additionally, if you did not comply with Microsoft’s forced migration from a Mojang account, or if you simply stopped playing and didn’t bother to migrate, your account, and all the capes associated with it, were lost to the void forever.
I did some research, and because of the rarity of the Minecon 2011 cape, it looks like accounts such as mine can go for around $6,000 according to one seller that I found.
The Minecraft account black market is a scary and dangerous place, full of scams and hackers. Thankfully, I’ve got my account two-factored out the wazoo, so I’m pretty confident nobody will be able to crack it, but that didn’t stop my account information from being plastered on some dark web Minecraft site.
A few years back, I started receiving emails from people offering me an insultingly low price for my account. It’s obvious that my account was leaked to some seedy site, along with the email address associated with it. One guy offered me $200 for my account, which I was obviously never going to take even if the account wasn’t priceless to me.
But more recently, I’ve been getting texts at my personal cell number about the account. Now, I’m not exactly off the grid. People can Google my name and my email address and get basic information. But I shudder to think about how these so-called “collectors” got a hold of my cell phone number. The texter also tried to low-ball me like you’ve never seen. I always just tell them it’s priceless to me.
I usually get an email or text or once or twice a year, and I usually just block the email and go about my day. But today, just a few hours ago, something happened that I’ve never experienced before. I got a FaceTime audio call from a number that I didn’t recognize. Curious, I answered it. The boy on the other side of the phone, who refused to identify himself, offered me $1,000on the spot to give him my account.
This is obviously a fucked-up breach of privacy on a lot of different levels, but you’ve got to respect him for trying. I simply explained the situation to him and he told me to call him or text him back if I ever changed my mind. I probably should have been more rude to him, but I was in the middle of a game of Street Fighter 6 and couldn’t properly process what was going on.
I can tell you that I will never call this kid back. But I can’t tell you whether or not the lowballs from 16-year-olds are ever going to stop.
So, now you know a little bit more about the value of Minecraft accounts, and what a curse (and a blessing) it can be to own one. Thank you for reading.
Where do we go from here?
I’d like to talk briefly about what I want to do with The Report Card moving forward. Obviously, my initial plan was to pump out a bunch of video game reviews with associated grades and then publish a monthly “report card” that gave you everything you needed to know about games at a glance.
While this is a great idea in theory, in practice, it’s wayyy too much for a single person to do. Moving forward, I’m still going to grade games and talk about whatever it is that I want to talk about, but I’m going to do away with the idea of a monthly round-up. It just isn’t practical.
Also, since I posted my last article, I got a few different jobs, celebrated my 2.5 year anniversary with my girlfriend and moved to New York. So it’s been busy, and I’ve really dropped the ball on keeping this up. But I want to get back into it, because even if nobody reads these, it’s quite fun. And it keeps me nimble.
I’m going to write for The Report Card whenever I get inspiration, so stay tuned. While the amount of articles coming out isn’t going to be as frequent as before, I’d really like to pick this back up. So stay tuned.
That’s it from me. Hopefully I’ll see you around. Thank you again for reading.
Owen, this was very enlightening and entertaining. We obviously had no idea about the long lasting effects of video games! Nice to know you have a little “bank account” available if ever necessary.
This is somewhat shocking and yet not that surprising! I remember when you went to the convention; a young boy, so happy and full of excitement! Back then who knew it will be more than a simple wonderful childhood memory.