When it comes to games that are just pure fun to play, Minecraft certainly is near the top of the list, if not on it. The game by Mojang took the world by storm by giving players near unlimited freedom in regards to building and creating in the block-filled world. What’s more, the game continued to release on platform after platform, regardless of whether it was a PC, console, or handheld device. This has turned out to be the right idea, because not only are sales incredible, the player base is massive.
Minecraft recently got a new boss in the form of Helen Chiang, which is significant in and of itself. Anywho, in an interview with Pop Sugar about her appointment to the head of the game, she revealed that the beloved title has had 144 million sales in its lifetime. That’s insane. But wait, it gets better, for she also revealed that the monthly player base for the game is continually growing.
“We just recently set a new record in December for monthly active users, so now we’re at 74 million monthly active users — and that’s really a testament to people coming back to the game”
Just to break some of these numbers down, Minecraft has released on 9 systems (as best we can figure) in its lifetime, which means, that if evenly divided up, each system bought 16 million copies of the game. Now, obviously, PC and certain other systems likely have more than that, but that actually makes it even more impressive. What’s more, the fact that over half of that number is still playing the game actively every month? That’s astonishing in every way imaginable.
The best part and Chiang noted this in her interview, is that the game isn’t stopping anytime soon. There’s going to be a big update via the Aquatic Update coming a bit later in the year, and the team won’t stop updating the game until people don’t want to play it anymore. And that could take a while.
