Do I have to purchase Minecraft 1.6.4?

October 19, 2013 10:08 AM

We have a Minecraft subscription. My son wants to upgrade to 1.6.4. I downloaded the "new launcher" and pressed "play demo" to install 1.6.4 on our machine. However, it's just a demo. If we already have a Minecraft subscription, do we have to pay an extra $20 or whatever to upgrade? Minecraft 1.7 is supposed to come out soon, so would I have to pay again to upgrade again? But the fundamental question is, do I have to purchase 1.6.4 if I already have a Minecraft subscription?
posted by KokuRyu to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (7 answers total)

No. Once you have a Minecraft account, you can use it for any version of Minecraft.
posted by nrobertson at 10:11 AM on October 19, 2013

Response by poster: Thank you. I guess I can't figure it out (I also found the initial install not particularly intuitive):

1) Open Minecraft client and login, see prompt to upgrade, click link, download new launcher, install launcher

2) "Launch" the launcher (it says that I'm logged in), "Play demo"

I can't figure out what I am doing wrong!
posted by KokuRyu at 10:18 AM on October 19, 2013

Did you try deleting the old install files before installing the new launcher? On windows it would be in C:\Users\(your name)\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft
posted by dilaudid at 10:29 AM on October 19, 2013

Oops, before you delete that make sure you make a backup of the saves folder if your son wants to keep his old worlds.
posted by dilaudid at 10:34 AM on October 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I got it to work somehow. Thank you for your help.

There is some weirdness in that the Mojang username / email and password is different than the creds for our Minecraft account, and the new launcher decided to use the wrong creds when logging in. Weird!
posted by KokuRyu at 10:54 AM on October 19, 2013

Sorry to ask a possibly insulting question, but my launcher doesn't have a 'play demo' button, and Minecraft has a one-time fee, not 'subscriptions'... have you been paying a recurring fee? And now your update says the account details didn't match. Are you sure nobody involved here has been caught in some kind of copycat scam?
posted by jinjo at 2:15 PM on October 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: No, I purchased a subscription / paid a fee with my own credit for my son's account... I don't play online games etc. so I probably got the terminology wrong. It's all legit.

dilaudid is on the right track. I can't quite figure out how to get rid of the old launcher, so every time now we launch the old 1.5 version of Minecraft, which directs me to the download page for the new launcher, which I download, which then launches 1.6.4.

Now I have to figure out how to get rid of the old install while saving my son's information.

It seems very strange to me that by downloading a new launcher, Mojang or Minecraft or whatever does not automatically update the launch process.
posted by KokuRyu at 5:12 PM on October 20, 2013