That’s a lot of Swedish meatballs.
Sweden’s most eligible bachelor (in some circles) and the head of Minecraft development studio Mojang, Markus “Notch” Persson, announced on Twitter today that his first-person block-building game for the PC reached the 8-million-copies-sold milestone. That’s in addition to at least 4 million units on Xbox 360 and probably a few more million from Minecraft Pocket Edition on smartphones, which Android users have downloaded at least a million times.
The PC version of Minecraft just passed 8 million sales! My face is making grinning sounds, so I assume it’s grinning!
— Markus Persson (@notch) Nov. 12, 2012
Very few games, if any, can compare to the word-of-mouth success of Minecraft. Most titles that sell in excess of 15 million copies have budgets in the millions and marketing campaigns to match. Mojang famously approached Minecraft from the opposite direction by building a small indie game and asking people to pay a discounted price for it while it was still in development.
Minecraft on Xbox Live Arcade is so popular that it actually unseated Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 as the most played game on the Xbox 360’s online service in the last week of October.
Notch has moved on from a personal involvement with Minecraft to work on a new Mojang title called 0x10c, which is a sandbox-style sci-fi space adventure for the PC. The game will follow the Minecraft model with early, unfinished versions sold to customers at a discount.