Minecraft Hits 144 Million Copies Sold, 74 Million Played Last Month

There’s been a lot of talk about the numbers games are pulling - from PUBG to Call of Duty to the Nintendo Switch; overall, it’s a popular topic. And after being wowed by the big numbers being thrown around, Minecraft lead Helen Chiang decided it was time to remind people who the real alpha dog is and announced Minecraft’s numbers over the month of December.

She revealed in an interview with PopSugar that the game had 74 million active users in December (dwarfing the 3 million that PUBG was bragging about earlier) and it has sold, across every console its available on, 144 million copies.

If there was ever a doubt if Minecraft is still relevant in the modern age (even with the lack of any big updates as of recent), this should erase them completely. She even spoke about the growth of the Minecraft brand and how she wants to make those numbers grow even bigger:

"All of our players are playing across a number of different devices and platforms, and it shouldn't matter where they're playing — what's important to us is that they have the opportunity to play it together, because it makes it so much more of a rich experience. That's the journey we're still on . . . we've been doing a lot of work to expand into new geographies and really just making Minecraft available to anybody, anywhere in the world, any way that they want to play."

Helen Chiang made headlines on January 17, when it was announced she’d be taking control over the Minecraft studio after the promotion of Matt Booty. This makes her the first woman of color to ever head a major game studio—a first you’d think we’d have reached a while ago, but apparently it’s happening now. A lot of eyes would have been on Minecraft because of this regardless… but now that we know how popular the game still is, “a lot” of eyes have just been upgraded to “a whole friggen’ lot”.

Good luck.