Minecraft Crosses 300M Copies Sold As The Best-Selling Game Of All Time

It seems like it was just yesterday that Minecraft hit 10 years old, but that was actually a half a decade ago. Since then, much has changed as the popular block-based game has continued to grow in popularity. However, with those changes come more eyes on the game overall and recent events surrounding Minecraft certainly highlight that. Though, Minecraft now turning fifteen is a huge milestone for the game and there are some incredible stats that go along with it.

In 2009, Minecraft was created by, the now excommunicated and ostracized, Markus “Notch” Persson, which led to the creation of the game studio Mojang. Some five years and 54 million copies of the game later, Microsoft moved to purchase Mojang for a staggering $2.5 billion making Notch, a leading stakeholder in Mojang, a billionaire overnight. He would go on to leave Mojang and generally separate from both the Minecraft and Microsoft ecosystems as he became more outspoken about a variety of topics.


Since Microsoft’s purchase of Minecraft, the game exploded in popularity, recently crossing the 300 million copies sold threshold. As of late, the Minecraft team estimates that on average per day, there are 15 million skeletons killed, 8.8 million pickaxes crafted, and 915km traveled on pigback. All this goes to show that Minecraft is still going strong with a plethora of players both new and old who are jumping in to build, mine, and eventually conquer the Ender Dragon.


While this achievement is still quite the celebration, some fans are seeing this time period through a different lens. Every year, the Minecraft team hosts Minecraft Live and with it comes the Mob Vote where players can vote on what new mob they would like to see come to the game in a future update. This year, the armadillo took the victory, but this tradition in general leaves some people with a sour taste in their mouth. As such, a petition to not only stop the mob vote but also simply add more mobs and content every year has been started. In the week since we last covered said petition, it has received approximately 322,000 signatures with a goal sitting at 1 million signatures.


During Minecraft Live, Vu Bui seemed to allude to this saying that mobs that did not quite make the cut during the vote may still make it to the game, as is the case with frogs. However, Minecrafters on Reddit have pointed out that this is not necessarily a new thing, and that they still want more content overall and that it is a shame these good ideas have to disappear indefinitely.

Ultimately, the addition of new content may be an issue of human power, or rather, a lack thereof even though this is now a Microsoft studio with quite a bit of backing. In any event, Minecraft is certainly still chugging right along and not doing too shabby all things considered. Even with the minor hiccups, it is still fun to see the growth and community come out of this game and its development.