Just a few short months after indie developer Mojang announced that Minecraft had reached the 20 million registered users milestone, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson announced on Twitter today that the wildly popular sandbox title has been downloaded 25 million times since launching in October 2010.
It’s an impressive number, to be sure, but the amount of actual sales of Minecraft isn’t quite so high. According to a report by the Financial Times, the game has sold a little over 5.3 million copies in the 15 months since Minecraft went on sale, which is up almost 1 million from the last count back in January.
Unsurprisingly, those 5.3 million copies translated into a whole lot of money for the company. The Financial Times reports: In financial filings in Sweden, Mojangrevealed that its revenues for the 15 months since Minecraft launched in October 2010 totalled $80m (540m Swedish krona), with earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation of $13.5m.
With Minecraft slowly but surely expanding to other platforms, that number is likely to continue its climb for the foreseeable future. Minecraft ‘s release on Xbox Live Arcade is still around the corner, and the mobile versions of Minecraft for iOS/Android are doing quite well for the company as well, selling 1.1 million copies to date.
Mojang has been continuing to support Minecraft with new features since the game went gold late last year, but that’s not all the indie developer is up to. Notch and his team are also working on Scrolls , which is said to go into alpha at some point later this year.
Source: Financial Times
