Minecraft Reaches 70 Million Units Sold – Over 20 Million For PC

Over the past few years, Minecraft has seen an incredible rise in popularity. Starting as a small indie game created by one man, Markus Notch Persson back in 2011 and has since developed into a multi-million dollar franchise. Not only has it become a hit with adults and average gamers around the world, but it has also become a huge hit with children. It has become such a success with children it has spawned everything from plush to figures and even has its own Lego line and has now officially sold over 70 million units. 20.1 million of those sales were for the PC/Mac platform according to the latest stats.

In fact it had gotten so big, that less than a year ago Microsoft bout out the company that published Minecraft, Mojang for about $2.5 billion. Clearly this was a smart decision on the part of Microsoft as the popularity of Minecraft has continued to grow in popularity even 4 years after its release. It looks like it is going to be expanded upon even further with Microsofts HoloLens technology that was demoed at E3 this year.

One unexpected area that the immense popularity of Minecraft has reached, and one that has helped it reach this benchmark, is the classroom. In an article in TIME magazine earlier this year, teachers discussed how they had been using Minecraft in their classrooms. Now Minecraft is preparing to launch a full teacher portal in game that will give teachers many more possibilities to incorporate Minecraft into their lessons. This could be the next step in the evolution of learning, providing a more interactive classroom experience.