Close to 15 years after its release, Minecraft is more popular than ever. The game is already one of the highest-selling games of all time, but on Monday the Microsoft-owned company Mojang declared it crossed the threshold of 300 million copies sold.
The sales number dropped at the Minecraft Live event on Sunday. During the show, the development team revealed a few new features being added to the game like trial chambers for players to test their skills in a dungeon crawl-type adventure.
Mojang also revealed during the show that it’s releasing more DLC based on Star Wars called Star Wars: Path of the Jedi to be set during the Clone Wars. There are also plans for a new educational adventure based on the upcoming BBC Earth documentary Planet Earth III.
The company also shared a few more cheeky stats such as players making over 700,000 cakes and crafting 8.8 million pickaxes on average per day. That’s based on a 30-day average of Minecraft’s player base from September to October.
It’s easy to see why Minecraft keeps selling. The Minecraft community is still enormous with streamers and tie-in initiatives like the recent Dungeons & Dragons partnership keeping the brand in peoples’ faces. Hell, we might even see some kind of Minecraft movie soon enough. That’s also not to mention the absolutely stunning worlds and environments released regularly by both fans and professional builders.
Minecraft sales already eclipsed Grand Theft Auto V’s 185 million global sales, though the block-building voxel game had the benefit of several years in beta before GTA V’s 2013 release.
Still, Minecraft has not been able to get a leg up on Tetris. The Tetris brand claims it has sold more than 520 million copies of its block-stacking puzzle game worldwide. Tetris has the benefit of a long, long shelf life. Henk Rogers, who helped bring Tetris to the U.S. back in the 1980s, told VentureBeat back in 2014 that Tetris had eclipsed 425 million paid downloads on mobile. But that number accounts for every phone that’s been able to play games for more than two decades. This makes Minecraft’s milestone even more significant.
Despite its eye-catching sales numbers, Minecraft doesn’t have the largest player base compared to games like Fortnite. According to ActivePlayer.io, Fortnite has boasted a monthly active player count of between 250 million and 220 million, while Minecraft monthly players peaked around March at 182 million. Still, for a game to hold that much attention after close to 15 years and stand toe to toe with an ultra-popular free-to-play game is indicative of Minecraft’s staying power.