Minecraft Has Sold Over 144 Million Copies, Sets a New Record for Active Players

While newer games make headlines for quickly putting up staggering sales and concurrent player figured, Minecraft continues chugging along while breaking its own records in both categories.

The world-building game that released in 2009 has only grown since then, both in terms of content and reach. It's playable on just about every platform you could hope for now, and that spread has paid off big time in terms of active players. Helen Chiang, the new head of Minecraft, recently told PopSugar that they set a new record for themselves in December with a new concurrent player figure.

"We just recently set a new record in December for monthly active users, so now we're at 74 million monthly active users — and that's really a testament to people coming back to the game, whether it's through the game updates or bringing in new players from across the world," she said.

The copies of the game that have been sold since its release are nothing to scoff at either, a figure that almost doubles the concurrent player record at 144 million copies sold. Much of that is likely due to the game's accessibility for those who are either gaming veterans or have little to no gaming experience, but recent additions to the game such as the Better Together update and future content help continue to grow that number.

"The Better Together update came out in the Fall, and that was really our first step towards this vision of bringing all of our players together," Chiang said.

"All of our players are playing across a number of different devices and platforms, and it shouldn't matter where they're playing — what's important to us is that they have the opportunity to play it together, because it makes it so much more of a rich experience. That's the journey we're still on . . . we've been doing a lot of work to expand into new geographies and really just making Minecraft available to anybody, anywhere in the world, any way that they want to play."

If you're now already one of the millions of active Minecraft players, you can find the game on the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, and phones and tablets.