MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Minecraft has sold over 30 million units on PC since it launched in 2009.
A tracker on the Minecraft website (thanks, GI.biz) has steadily been clocking up the sales and broke through the 30 million milestone yesterday.
Of course, that’s just a fraction of the overall sales. Counting downloads on console and mobile devices, too, that figure was standing at 154 million six months ago – and that’s not including the estimated 150m sales in China, either.
Minecraft is still going strong and still relevant, according to Microsoft. The creative playground was still logging over 90 million monthly users at the end of last year. Microsoft’s $2.5 billion (£1.9bn) purchase of Mojang back in 2014 was a huge sum to pay for what was, in essence, a one-game studio. It’s paying off, though; in 2018 alone the monthly player count has increased by around 20 million, and while there’s speculation about when – or whether – the game might see a sequel, Microsoft’s not talking about it yet.
“It’s something that always fractures the community”, Microsoft’s head of Minecraft, Helen Chiang said last year. “We don’t want to ask [players] to move from Minecraft 1 to Minecraft 2. We want them to just enjoy Minecraft. And there’s other ways that we can expand that are more meaningful and authentic to what we want to be, rather than just releasing another iteration in the way that most other franchises do.”
A recent Minecraft update removed all references to its creator, Markus “Notch” Persson, from its loading screens, including some of the randomised messages that pop up on the loading screen. He is, however, still listed as the game’s creator in Minecraft’s credits.
