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.

Comments

Re:who did what, now?

[rapu]

They mean Microsoft.

Blocks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Note the top two selling games of all times are about placing blocks.

Re:Blocks?

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:Blocks?

[cyclomedia]

Plus it runs like a dog on anything but a monster PC. While the console edition (being a native port) runs fine on my Xbox 360. When MS acquired it I was hoping for a native DirectX C++ port (with mod compatibility, magically somehow), but all they've managed is porting pocket edition to Windows 10 App Store. Meh

Re:Blocks?

[CastrTroy]

I have an AMD box with an integrated GPU and Minecraft runs just fine. I'll admit, it runs pretty slow on some of the laptops I've seen with their sorry excuse for graphics processors, but on any basic desktop chip it will run just fine.

I think the problems are more to do with bad coding than anything to do with the language it is written in. On a slow computer you can see the tunnels that are miles away from you get drawn before the ground right in front of you. Why do they even bother drawing the tunnels you'll never end up seeing anyway?

Re:Blocks?

[JediJorgie]

> yeah that vile c++ language, how dare it make it so easy for even experienced programmers to create buffer overflows.

FTFY.

Re:who did what, now?

[SeaFox]

Maybe that's not such a bad idea. Rename the company Minecraft.
Kinda like Philip Morris changing their name to the Altria Group, to help people forget about the horrible products [i]they[/i] made.

Re:Open Source

[donaldm]

I will not care until Minecraft is open source.

Well, you could try "Minetest" or any of the following here

Re:who did what, now?

[donaldm]

Maybe that's not such a bad idea. Rename the company Minecraft. Kinda like Philip Morris changing their name to the Altria Group, to help people forget about the horrible products [i]they[/i] made.

They will even make more money if they bring out a version of Minecraft called "Call of Duty - Minecraft" or better yet to cover all bases "Minecraft Battlefront". :-)

Re:Perfect for VR

[gl4ss]

room scale? soo.. like 7x7x7 blocks?

Re:Open Source

[Thanshin]

How strong is your grasp on assembly?

Re:who did what, now?

[jones_supa]

At least in my perception Microsoft's reputation has increased in past few years. They make stable, fast and secure software. Also, for feedback and support, their developers are more easy to reach than before.

Earth

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Open Source

[mlw4428]

It would never have sold 100 million copies as an open source game. You're more than welcome to do all the work they did and make your own popular game and open source it.

Re:Open Source

[SharpFang]

Actually, following some leaks, decompilation, forgotten debug symbols etc, full source of Minecraft is available. Not legally, but still.

Re:who did what, now?

[SharpFang]

It got a decent boost with Win7. Win8 was more or less underwhelming, but not disastrous. Now the current push for Win10 earns them reputation of some supervillain with a master plan.

Re:who did what, now?

[donaldm]

It got a decent boost with Win7. Win8 was more or less underwhelming, but not disastrous. Now the current push for Win10 earns them reputation of some supervillain with a master plan.

I installed MS Win10 in a virtual machine a few hours ago and as an operating system, it is fine, as I would expect it to be.

Here are my observations.
1) The base OS installed from the ISO is about 9.4GB.
2) Very pretty although that is subjective and you like tiles, although it is possible to hide them.
3) Verry intrusive into your private use.
4) Loves to make is fairly difficult for the average user to change the security settings. Fortunately, there are private tools (be careful) that can fix that.
5) Please check out the following site . The presenter does not object to Win10 however he does not like the way Microsoft hides the fact that this OS can phone home if you let it. What is even more reprehensible is that after an update some of your settings may be reverted back from "off" to "on". Sure this is not a big deal for someone with a bit of technical knowledge but most people don't have that.

Compared against my Fedora 23 KDE Spin:
1) My 2600 packages which include the OS, GUI and lots of packages such as LibreOffice, The Gimp, Handbrake, Chrome, Firefox, some serious maths packages, video display software such as VLC and MPV Media Player as well as a host of other packages too numerous to name here, add up to 9.1GB. Even Linux Mint with it's base ISO install (including LibreOffice and The Gimp) is about 5.1GB. What on earth has Win10 got in that 9.4GB base ISO install that does not have an Office or photo editing suite?
2) My fully customizable KDE display is also very nice and while it does not use tiles (very subjective here) it is very functional and IMHOmuch more flexible.

As for installing Fedora it took about the same as it took to install MS Win10, but configuring for security was so much easier in Fedora (again subjective).

Personally, I would rather use Fedora since I have full control, however, there is nothing inherently wrong with Win10 if you lock it down but this is beyond the capability of most users.