Minecraft XBLA Recoups Costs In An Hour, Breaks XBL Sales Records

I can’t imagine this news is going to come as a surprise to anyone, but Major Nelson says that Minecraft XBLA has broken “all” previous Xbox Live sales records within its first 24 hours of being available on the platform.

Major Nelson didn’t give us exact sales numbers–Microsoft is always stingy with their sales data, in case you’re new to this–but he did give us at least a general idea of how big a success Minecraft XBLA is. As of now, there are a bit over 400,000 entries on the leaderboard, suggesting that sales numbers are around the half-a-million range.

As if that wasn’t already impressive enough, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson tweeted that Minecraft was profitable within the first hour of being available on Xbox Live. To put that into perspective for you, that means Minecraft recouped its costs before most people in North America had the chance to wake up and download it.

I haven’t had a chance to take a look at the XBLA port of Minecraft, but everything I’ve read about in reviews and seen for myself in video form suggests that the port was handled quite well–certainly far better than I expected it to turn out. So if your PC wasn’t able to run Minecraft and you’ve always wanted to check it out, the XBLA version seems like a safe bet.

Have you tried Mincraft XBLA yet?