Minecraft Becomes Fastest Selling XBLA Game Ever
People figured that Minecraft would make a big splash on the Xbox 360, but I don’t think anybody was expecting this! The hit indie game, developed by Notch and his team Mojang, was released on May 9th, and in just five days managed to sell over 1 million copies. The PC version of the game, which has been out officially since November, but also had been available for Beta access earlier, has sold 5 million copies of the game. It’s almost hard to imagine a game selling that many copies so quickly!
Minecraft also broke the first day record as it took the “Fastest Selling Xbox Live Arcade Game Ever” title from Trials Evolution, which sold 100,000 copies on its first day. Though it’s impossible at this particular point to know how many copies were sold in the first 24 hours, Notch did estimate using the leaderboard stats that the game sold at least 400,000 copies. In other words, Minecraft seems to have outsold the previous record holder in the first day by a 4:1 ratio.
Microsoft announced as well that the people playing the game are putting in some serious time into it, as at least 5.2 million total hours have been played, with 2.4 million of those hours going into the multiplayer. Also, 4 million total multiplayer sessions have been played. Not bad for a game that wasn’t developed by a huge company. Not bad at all.
