When did Minecraft become the best-selling game?

Almost 14 years ago, Mojang launched their sandbox game called Minecraft. It was an extremely retro-looking game that had blocky graphics and pixelated textures. While almost the entire gaming industry pushed for ultra-realistic graphics, Mojang stuck with blocky and basic graphics for their games. Despite that, the open nature of the game and the possibilities, if offered, made it the most-selling title in the entire world.

Here is a short view of the past as to how and when the game became the most popular.

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When did Minecraft achieve the milestone of being the most-sold game in the world?

Back in 2019, Microsoft released an official statement through Xbox Wire where they stated how the game has now been sold 176 million times and talked about their new game, Minecraft Earth. The first line of the post, written by Erica Walsh, read:

"This is an incredibly exciting time for Minecraft. Ten years ago today, the game launched on PC. Now, Minecraft has sold more than 176 million copies to-date in virtually every country in the world."

Though this post was mainly about their new game, other analysts learned that the blocky game by Mojang could have just surpassed Tetris and become the most-sold video game of all time.

Since Tetris has loads of different versions, even when the combined figures of EA's free-to-play Tetris and another official version are counted, it comes to 170 million. Hence, in 2019, the Sandbox title became the most-sold game of all time, with 176 million copies sold.

Public servers in the game are filled with thousands of concurrent players every day. (Image via Mojang)

While another famous title, Grand Theft Auto 5, constantly chased Minecraft for the title, the simple sandbox game kept growing bigger and bigger, to a point where no other game even comes close to it in terms of sales.

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Current number of copies sold of Minecraft

Mojang shares bizarre stats after the game hit 300 million copies. (Image via Mojang)

In 2023, Mojang hosted yet another live show where they talked about everything related to their games and gave some exciting news about the new updates. Along with that, Mojang also announced that the company has now sold over 300 million copies of the game worldwide. This increases their lead in the all-time list of most-sold games even further.

In less than five years, they were able to increase their sales by twofold. Of course, several aspects helped the company sell more copies, with the pandemic being one reason, as everyone was stuck at home and was not considerably occupied. Furthermore, famous YouTubers like PewDiePie also started playing the game around June 2019, which brought the game back into the spotlight.

It is safe to say that the game will continue to sell quite a lot, simply because even after more than a decade, its sales are not even dipping.