Minecraft Passes 6 Million PC Sales, 9.2 Million Total

[News Portal]

On Twitter today, a conversation between Notch and Mojang's business developer, Daniel Kaplan, revealed the total number of sales for Minecraft across all platforms as a massive 9.2 million, with 6 million of those on PC. PC sales were at 4 million last November, meaning 2 million sales over the last six months. And we can't forget its success on the XBox 360 as well, selling one million copies in under a week, making it the fastest selling game on XBox Live Arcade of all time.

Source: Eurogamer

Read full article by GON News

[Krogan]

All I can think about right now is how related the failure of Kingdom of Amalur and the success of Minecraft are, comparing these two tells us everything we need to know about how to succeed and how to fail.

I would argue that Minecraft is the most successful game in gaming history and all because it actually understood what we wanted, freedom.

[Mekon]

I would argue that Minecraft is the most successful game in gaming history and all because it actually understood what we wanted, freedom.

Don't you mean, it understood what certain people wanted? Every game is a niche product aimed at a subset of the overall market.

By your argument, World of Warcraft is what all gamers want as it sold well in excess of 20M copies. Or even more aptly, Farmville is what everybody really wanted, as it has in excess of 80M players! And at the very pinnacle of gaming run-away successes, the Angry Birds franchise holds the crown with 1B downloads (with 500M in the last 6 months).

See what happens when you make overly broad generalisations?

[Mank]

All I can think about right now is how related the failure of Kingdom of Amalur and the success of Minecraft are, comparing these two tells us everything we need to know about how to succeed and how to fail.

Any overzealous, poorly managed business venture will fail.

Besides, Amalur in itself was a decent game, not without its bugs and failures sure, but a good game never the less.

Not our fault Big Huge Games was trying to recoup their losses from faults of their own, and bought 38 Studios, sealing the deal for that studio as well (Or was it the other way around? Anyway, that's my basic impression. EDIT: It is the other way around). See the pattern?

9.2 million, not bad. What do they do with all that money?

[Mearehear]

See what happens when you make overly broad generalisations?

Who do you have to be such an arse? His statement was a "general" one and that is all it was intended to be, but you want to read more into it and swipe at his "general" comment with stats and figures, and this just leaves you looking like a silly, arrogant tosspot.

Saying the freedom is what we want is a perfectly acceptable "generalisation", without need of further over analyzing.

[Mekon]

Saying the freedom is what we want is a perfectly acceptable "generalisation", without need of further over analyzing.

Sine when is accepting reality equivalent to being an arse?

I disagreed that Minecraft was the most successful game in gaming history and backed it up with figures. The problem with that is what exactly?

Clearly Amalur and Minecraft are completely separate genres; games with far less freedom (Farmville and Angry Birds) sold far better. Perhaps making Amalur more like Angry Birds would have resulted in a runaway success?