Minecraft notches over 1,000,000 sales
When a major console or PC game racks up a million copies sold, it rarely registers as a blink in the market. A million sometimes doesn’t recoup the costs of a ‘Triple A” title. In comparison, not many indie games manage to get close to that number. Markus “Notch” Persson’s Minecraft is another story though. Sold online via the Minecraft website, not only did the game hit one million in sales, but it shows little evidence of slowing down.
Back in the late summer, the game started getting a lot of positive press, and rightly so, leading it to its first half million in sales just before Hallowe’en, or about four months after it entered the alpha stage. Sure that’s impressive, and I’m sure Notch is pretty happy about it. What makes it more interesting though is that the sales pattern stands in stark contrast to the more traditional game publishing models, as Minecraft managed to sell the next 500,000 in less than 2 1/2 months, which is about 40% faster than the first. This stands in stark contrast to most major release models, not just in gaming, but traditional models such as film and music, which depend on front-end heavy marketing to make an impression on consumers.
The extremely high sales may make Minecraft a bit of an anomaly, but the idea that an independent project of quality can have sustained sales over the course of months is certainly encouraging to developers.
[…] [ED Note: Minecraft has now racked up over 1,000,000 sales.] […]