This past week has been a big one for Minecraft. Not only did Mojang and Microsoft mark the blocky builder’s 10-year anniversary with a special theme park map, but the studios also revealed the exciting free-to-play augmented reality game for mobile, Minecraft Earth. But most impressively of all, in a post on Microsoft’s official website about the 10-year celebration, creative director Saxs Persson revealed Minecraft has now sold 176 million copies worldwide, which might possibly mean it’s the best-selling game of all time.
“This is an incredibly exciting time for Minecraft. Ten years ago today, the game launched on PC” Persson wrote. “Now, Minecraft has sold more than 176 million copies to-date in virtually every country in the world.”
This impressive figure is for unit sales across its entire lifetime on every platform, including mobile, but folks immediately started looking into figures for other game sales to find out if this puts Minecraft in the top selling spot. As of 2014, Tetris had reportedly sold 170 million copies. It's likely that the figure in sales for Tetris has increased since then though, and as an updated figure can’t currently be confirmed, there’s no way to know for sure if Minecraft beats Tetris’ sales figures to be the best-selling game of all time.
Grand Theft Auto V is the only other game to reach the 100 million mark in sales, with Wii Sports clocking in at 82 million. Regardless of if it actually is the best-selling, it’s still an impressive amount of sales and just goes to show Minecraft’s long-running success isn’t dying down anytime soon.
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