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Minecraft Tops 100 Million Sales (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Mojang has announced today that its game 'Minecraft' has passed 100 million sales across all platforms, including PC, Mac, consoles and mobile. Nearly 53,000 copies of the game have been sold every single day around the world since the beginning of the year. What may be even more impressive is the fact that more than 40 million people actively open up a Minecraft world each month and play around with a blocky axe, shovel and sword. According to Wikipedia, Minecraft is the second-bestselling video game of all-time next to Tetris. Tetris has sold a whopping 495 million copies, so don't expect Minecraft to earn the number one spot anytime soon. Microsoft did acquire Mojang almost two years ago, and there has been no word on a sequel as the company continues to release Minecraft for new platforms like HoloLens and Samsung's Gear VR. Soon, there will even be a version made just for China too.
Sorry, but the fact that it's written in Java is, if anything, detrimental to its success. What makes it so great is that it can be modded, you identified that one correctly, and there are many other examples of games that are mediocre at best that had a lot of success mostly because they're easily modable, but Java is not the reason for this.
If anything, you could say that it was lucky Notch coded it in Java because he didn't think of making it modable and owing it to Java it can be modded easily. Well, not as easily as it COULD be if he actually created it with modding in mind in a sensible language instead of this memory hog clusterfuck, but yes, in a roundabout way, Java made Minecraft a success. But saying that Java is the reason is about as sensibly as saying the unsanitary conditions in Flemming's lab were the key to his discovery of Penicillin.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My dream is to play a Minecraft world that is a 1:1 mapping of Earth, with proper terrain and biomes. I did find a map called Earth long time ago but it was really scaled down and not very realistic (still impressive, though).
I wonder if you could modify the chunk generator to download from Google Earth and generate realistic chunks on the fly...