Beginning life as a tiny early access alpha, Minecraft has over the last few years become one of the best selling games of all time. The last time we checked in with sales figures, Mojang put the number at 106 million copies across all of its many variations. After years of being available on everything from PC to mobile phones you might think that sales had slowed. They haven’t. As of this morning Minecraft has sold over 122 million copies.
The announcement was made on Twitter with a creative gif that explains what that number means. “3.8 million of you are as tall as Hugh Jackman,” explained the gif. “12 million of you hate cilantro. 4 million are cat people. 4.8 are dog people.” It’s truly an astonishing number and shows the power that the Minecraft brand has.
And if you thought that maybe these were just sales numbers that had accumulated over the years, know that Minecraft is still a massively popular game that is played every day by millions of players, 55 million to be exact.
This was made clear in a followup tweet with a similar gif that broke down this other insane number. Apparently if that many people stood in a single conga line they’d circle the entire globe. I don’t have the stats to check this, but it seems fairly accurate, based on my very minimal understanding of conga lines and the Earth.
Minecraft is a true global phenomenon, the likes of which come around very rarely. Video games have seen success like this before though. In fact, according to Wikipedia’s list of best selling games of all time, Minecraft is number 2. Tetris takes the top spot with an even more insane 495 million. Of course, this includes all versions of the game, which has been famous for its many variations and different releases.
Could Minecraft, given enough time, reach the top spot? It’d take a lot, but with it still selling millions of copies every few months it is within the realm of possibility.
