In terms of the size of the community, nobody could touch Minecraft right now.
Mojang executive Helen Chiang said there are more than 112 million users of Minecraft every month. The number of players even exceed the population of most countries. In fact, if you were to rank Minecraft among the world’s most populous countries, it ranks 11th out of 232.
She said that most of the players leave the game for a short time. They might be playing other games because there are plenty of titles out there. The important thing is that they often come back to playing Minecraft at some point.
In January 2018, Microsoft announced that Minecraft had 75 million players. In October last year, Microsoft made another announcement that the Minecraft community grew to 91 million.
That means in the last 12 months, and the Minecraft community grew more than 20 million since that announcement.
What’s remarkable about the numbers is that the game was introduced in the market in 2011. However, the alpha version of the game was actually on May 17, 2009.
The Markus “Notch” Persson created the game without any help. In 2014, he later sold the title to Microsoft for a cool $2.5 billion.
However, the relationship soured after Microsoft took offense of the comments made by Persson online. For instance, people ganged up on Persson he said trans people suffer from a mental illness.
In one Twitter post, he called those in the left as evil as he accused them of slandering Atari creator Nolan Bushnell. In January, the Game Developer’s Conference rescinded the lifetime achievement award due to alleged sexually charged comments he made previously. Notch said Bushnell was the latest victim of the #MeToo movement.
He also said that Minecraft sucked and hinted that Microsoft dropped the ball on the game. Notch also advised fans to take over the game and make their own adventures.
One of the best features of Minecraft is the players’ ability to mod the game. They can add new features and even characters to the game. However, Microsoft and Mojang do not support Minecraft mods. This means that if your game breaks because you installed the mod, you are on your own. But Microsoft has announced that they are mulling on releasing a plugin API for Minecraft. This hopefully makes mods more stable and safe. There’s no official release date for the planned workbench, however.
