Minecraft is one of the most popular and commercially successful games in history. Microsoft has now shared a new sales update for the entire franchise--and it's huge.
Minecraft creative director Saxs Persson said in a blog post that the franchise--which debuted on PC 10 years ago in 2009--has now crossed 176 million copies sold. This counts copies sold across all platforms. The game has sold a copy in nearly every country in the world, Persson added. This includes at least four copies sold in Antarctica.
The game launched on PC, but now it's available pretty much everywhere you can play games, including console, mobile, and more.
Less than three years ago, in June 2016, developer Mojang announced that Minecraft lifetime sales stood at 106.85 million copies, so sales have continued steadily since then.
Not only have many, many people bought Minecraft, they're also playing a lot. By Microsoft's latest count, the game has 91 million monthly players, which is many millions ahead of Fortnite.
Given the huge success of Minecraft, you might think Microsoft would want to release Minecraft 2, but that's not going to happen soon--or ever. If Microsoft were to make Minecraft 2, the player base might get fractured as some move to the sequel and others stay with the original. While Microsoft could theoretically do that and still make a lot of money, it makes more sense to keep the community together, according to Minecraft boss Helen Chiang.
"We're trying to keep our community together," she explained. "That's why our updates our free. We don't want to ask [players] to move from Minecraft 1 to Minecraft 2. We want them to just enjoy Minecraft. And there's other ways that we can expand that are more meaningful and authentic to what we want to be, rather than just releasing another iteration in the way that most other franchises do."
In other news about games that have sold an unthinkable number of copies, Take-Two just announced that Grand Theft Auto V has sold almost 110 million copies.
Multiple new Minecraft games are in development, including an AR game called Minecraft Earth and a dungeon-crawler style project called Minecraft Dungeons.
Microsoft acquired Minecraft and developer Mojang in 2015 for $2.5 billion. The game's creator, Markus "Notch" Persson, is no longer involved with the franchise and Microsoft is distancing itself from him in the wake of his controversial opinions.