Minecraft has reached another incredible milestone, topping 200 million copies sold and boasting an incredible monthly player base of 126 million, according to Microsoft’s information dump about the game today.
Minecraft is now the best-selling video game of all time, sitting more than 80 million copies ahead of Grand Theft Auto V. But it’s still growing and shows no signs of slowing down.
Microsoft purchased developer Mojang for $2.5 billion in 2014 when Minecraft had recorded just over 50 million copies sold across all platforms. The sandbox game hit the 100 million mark in 2016, meaning the growth of the game has actually increased in the last four years in comparison to the first five years after it launched in November 2011.
Over the last several months, Minecraft has seen a 25-percent increase in new players picking up the game and a nearly 40-percent jump in multiplayer sessions as more players try to find ways to pass the time during the ongoing global health crisis.
Mojang celebrated Minecraft’s birthday on May 17, marking 11 years since the game launched in its original alpha build. As part of the celebration, the developer rebranded itself into Mojang Studios, which Microsoft said was going to unify the “dual studios in Redmond and Stockholm.”
Minecraft experienced a massive resurgence in 2019, bringing in more than 100 billion views on YouTube and growing into a top-10 game on Twitch, going from an average of 6,000 viewers to more than 50,000 last month. It’s now the ninth most-streamed game on Twitch, with millions of hours of watch time recorded each week in live content.
Mojang will release its next game, the dungeon crawler Minecraft Dungeons, on May 26. It’ll be the first new title fully developed by the company since Crown and Council in 2016.
