Ah, Minecraft. Not since WoW have we seen a gaming experience so effortlessly addictive, not to mention appealing to the obsessive-compulsive in all of us. As testament to that fact, Minecraft Pocket Edition has now sold over one million copies on the Android Market since its introduction just six months ago. That doesn’t even come close to the game’s success on the PC side, but it’s incredibly impressive nonetheless. Minecraft developer Danuel Kaplan confirmed the news on his Twitter account.
One million copies of an app isn’t an unheard of achievement in the Android Market – Angry Birds has over fifty million so far. But Minecraft has an important difference: not only is it a paid app, it’s a full $6.99, double or triple the cost of most paid games available on the Market today. Taking Kaplan’s statement at face value, he must be combining sales from the Xperia Play version and copies sold via the Amazon Appstore and other third parties, since the current Android Market stats show no more than 500,000 in sales.
Developer Mojang isn’t letting the success go to their heads. Minecraft Pocket Edition has seen steady updates since its introduction, slowly adding familiar features from the desktop version into the mobile game to recreate the full open-world experience for its players. The latest update three weeks ago added the popular Survival Mode, plus wandering mobs of sheep and zombies. (No word on zombie sheep.) If you want to see what all the fuss is about, you can download the free demo in the Android Market – just don’t say we didn’t warn you.
I wonder if this counts purchases made during the 10p app promotion period
Pretty sure it does, which is why I’m not so terribly surprised at those numbers.
Steady updates? That’s a good one.