The Story of Minecraft

One of the most popular games in today’s time - Minecraft - has a journey full of ups and downs. The game was first released in 2009 and now it is so much loved by gamers that it sees more than 126 million monthly active users in 2020.

This story is all about how Minecraft was developed as a part-time project to the best-selling video game of all time with over 200 million copies sold!

Early Days

Markus Persson, the developer of Minecraft, was working in a game development company when he got the idea of developing his own game as a hobby project.

While working on different games, he took inspiration for his game. The game that highly influenced Minecraft was Infiminer. The blocky UI and infinite exploration was taken from there only. Markus added RPG capabilities into the game and that’s what made it quite unique from its contemporary games.

After completing the first version of the game, Markus started selling it on forums for just Є10. For more than a year, Markus continued to update the game, selling copies manually on forums and also maintained his day job.

The Launch

In 2010, he set up Mojang Studios with money he had earned and kept on releasing updates until he achieved 1 million sales in January 2011.

Even after that, it took almost one more year to take the game out of Beta versions.

After 2 years of tirelessly developing and updating the game, Mojang finally announced the full version release in November 2011.

In the next few months, Mojang hired developers from other famous game studios and expanded the core team.

The users were playing the games for hours and hours, day and night. In fact, some users started making their own servers for minecraft to play in groups.

One of the servers that became very popular was Kohi server. It also made tools like Kohi click test that would help minecraft players to improve their games.

Other servers that are notable till today include Hypixel, Mineplex etc.

The Success

The game was already a hit with revenues in millions of dollars and was blowing records in the industry.

Still, the not many industry stakeholders were interested in the so called ‘indie game’.

By April 2013, Minecraft hit the 10 million mark in PC game sales only. That was the point when industry giants had to take it as a serious competition.

As the success continued, in 2014, Microsoft announced a $2.5 Billion deal to buy Minecraft and its intellectual property rights.

Soon after the acquisition, Markus Persson was made to leave the company due to an arguable controversy and Microsoft continued the total control over the game.

All this did not have any effect on the game’s popularity (thankfully!)

Minecraft became the all-time best-selling video game ever in 2019 with more than 176 million copies sold across different platforms.

The Present

Now, Minecraft is not only a game but it is a brand in itself. Gamers are made about it and Microsoft left no stones unturned to make the Minecraft community proud about the game.

It is one of those few games that have their own official merchandise, toys and even a dedicated community festival that happens every year!

There is no doubt that Minecraft will continue to touch even more milestones and keep on this success journey for a long time!