A question that has always arisen and I can not explain it and is that since 2015 the game was less popular. I do not know why that happened because the Minecraft community has been very big between 2011 and 2015. Why did it happen?
Minecraft continues to sell at a mind-boggling pace: Developer Mojang has now sold 122 million copies of the sandbox exploration game across all platforms, the Microsoft-owned Swedish studio announced today.
Microsoft’s previous milestone was 100 million copies, which Minecraft reached in early June 2016. That means that a whopping 22 million people bought a copy of the game in the last nine months. Asked by Polygon, a Microsoft representative clarified that although the company has been allowing owners of the original Java-based PC/Mac version of Minecraft to get a free copy of Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition, Microsoft does not include those redemptions in its sales calculation.
“The 122M units is paid units to players only,” the spokesperson told Polygon.
Mojang also announced today that Minecraft currently has 55 million monthly active players, an increase of 37.5 percent from the 40 million that Microsoft reported back in June. It’s possible that the recent release of version 1.0 of Minecraft’s Windows 10 Edition and Pocket Edition — the former is essentially a port of the latter — helped raise the number of monthly active users. Mojang released the Ender Update for those versions in mid-December, officially bringing them out of beta.
To put that into perspective, in just 9 months during 2016-2017 Minecraft sold more copies than all but 25 of the best-selling games of all-time; of those, the newest is GTA V, which was released in 2013.
Even the Java version, which is most-targeted by the "Minecraft is dying/losing popularity!" claims, is holding its own - as long people keep buying the game it doesn't matter if some are getting tired out it and quitting (which is only a small percentage if 55 out of 122 million players still play it at least monthly):
(note that since this chart was made over 4 million more copies have been sold)
What IS losing popularity though is these forums, which used to have dozens of times more activity than they currently have (just look at the total number of posts in sections like Discussion and Survival Mode, then see how much activity they have had recently. For comparison, a single thread on Reddit can easily blow away either of those entire sections; just compare this recent one I made to a much more detailed thread on the same world which has been around for over 3 years).
A question that has always arisen and I can not explain it and is that since 2015 the game was less popular. I do not know why that happened because the Minecraft community has been very big between 2011 and 2015. Why did it happen?
To put that into perspective, in just 9 months during 2016-2017 Minecraft sold more copies than all but 25 of the best-selling games of all-time; of those, the newest is GTA V, which was released in 2013.
Even the Java version, which is most-targeted by the "Minecraft is dying/losing popularity!" claims, is holding its own - as long people keep buying the game it doesn't matter if some are getting tired out it and quitting (which is only a small percentage if 55 out of 122 million players still play it at least monthly):
(note that since this chart was made over 4 million more copies have been sold)
What IS losing popularity though is these forums, which used to have dozens of times more activity than they currently have (just look at the total number of posts in sections like Discussion and Survival Mode, then see how much activity they have had recently. For comparison, a single thread on Reddit can easily blow away either of those entire sections; just compare this recent one I made to a much more detailed thread on the same world which has been around for over 3 years).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Yeah, the forums becoming less populated =/= the game decreasing in popularity.