Minecraft has hit an incredible milestone — 300 million sales.
Mojang Studios announced the news at Minecraft Live 2023.
The last official figures given for the game were from 2021, when Minecraft had notched up 238 million sales, up from 200 million in May 2020.
Here’s one that’ll make some of us feel old: Minecraft was originally released 11 years, 11 months ago, in November 2011. And a basic version was initially made public in May 2009.
News of one of the best-selling games of all time selling even more copies may not sound that interesting but 300 million sales equates to 47 copies of Minecraft sold a minute, every minute, since the game was released.
To illustrate further just how big this is, Minecraft is out of the league of even the second-place game, Grand Theft Auto V, which has sold upwards of 185 million copies to date.
Both eclipse Nintendo’s best-selling game, Wii Sports, which shipped 82.9 million copies and was packed in with Wii consoles. Its one sales rival is Tetris. Henk Rogers, credited with bringing Tetris to the West, claimed the game had racked-up 425 million paid mobile downloads in an interview with Venturebeat from 2014.
The important context here is the sheer number of platforms on which Minecraft is available.
How to play Minecraft
You can play Minecraft on PCs and Macs, three generations of Xbox and PlayStation consoles, Nintendo and Sony handhelds, iPhones and Android phones. And, unlike so many developers, Mojang found huge success on mobile phones despite charging £6.99 (previously £4.99).
The most recent major version is Minecraft for Chromebooks, a long overdue port released in July 2023.
Minecraft has not stayed still since it launched. Over at the Minecraft website, you can see a timeline of how the game world has become more rich and complex over the years. And an “archaeology, cherry trees and storytelling” update is coming in the future.
The game remains hugely popular among YouTube streamers, and was even how the 200-million-subscriber MrBeast started out.
Nowadays, Minecraft is owned by Microsoft. The tech giant acquired the game, and its owner Mojang, in 2015 for $2.5 billion, equivalent to £1.62 billion at the exchange rate of the day.
Markus Persson, known as Notch, is credited as the creator of Minecraft, although developer Mojang Studios had 29 staff at the time of the game’s initial release back in 2011. Mojang is estimated to have upwards of 700 staff in 2023.
Microsoft removed references to Persson from Minecraft in 2019, following a series of transphobic tweets posted by the developer.
