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.
Microsoft had been selling the beta of Minecraft’s Windows 10 Edition at a discounted price of $9.99. However, now that the game is past version 1.0, that deal will soon end — the price will go up to its normal level, $26.99, after March 20.
Potion bottles are such a huge part of being a geek. We drink them in games to power up, get healthy, use magic, and get superpowers. This Minecraft Color Changing Potion Bottle is a great way to decorate for your geek way of life.
It lights up and switches between indigo, light blue, cyan, green, peach, yellow, red, and white. You can even tap it to move to the next color. It also has a 1-minute timeout to preserves battery life. Just touch it again to light it up.
It is a must have for Minecraft fans. Get yourself one for $19.99(USD) from ThinkGeek.
Film-maker Ben Wheatley has revealed how he used the video game Minecraft to help him build the set for his new action movie Free Fire.
The film starring Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy, Sharlto Copley and Michael Smiley is dominated by a complicated shootout in an abandoned factory.
During a Q&A on the movie in Inverness, Wheatley said he first created the factory’s layout in Minecraft.
This helped to guide physical scale models and the final set.
Wheatley, director of High-Rise and Sightseers, was in Inverness on Monday as part of a tour of UK cinemas with his film before it goes out on general release.
The Minecraft franchise continues to soar. Microsoft announced today that the series has passed 121 million copies sold and 55 million unique players. This is the first official sales and engagement update since June, when Microsoft confirmed 100 million sales and 40 million unique monthly players.
Microsoft celebrated the new Minecraft milestones today with some animated GIFs that speak to the enormity of the sandbox game as it relates to sales and monthly users.
At the time the buyout was announced, Persson said about the deal: “It’s not about the money. It’s about my sanity.”
Minecraft is available on PC and all major consoles, as well as smartphones. Looking ahead, Minecraft and Minecraft: Story Mode are headed to Nintendo Switch.
“I don’t know if Minecraft 2, if that’s the thing that makes the most sense,” he said at the time. “The community around Minecraft is as strong as any community out there. We need to meet the needs and the desires of what the community has before we get permission to go off and do something else.”
Being the biggest game in the world means you never stop growing, like a completely out of control katamari. Such it is that Minecraft 1.12 has begun development, with snapshot 17w06a available to the public and thoroughly analysed for new bits and blocks. Here’s the basics.
Can create patterns by being placed in certain ways.
Wool and Banner blocks got new textures, while various bug fixes and quality of life changes were applied, as laid out on the wiki. The change to Wool also effected Sheep. Naturally.
The only wider-scope change is the addition of savable toolbars in creative mode, letting you more easily make that giant statue of Mega Man, or whatever it is you get up to in there. Unsurprisingly, you can have nine of them as they use the number keys for loading and saving – ctrl+# and shift+# respectively.
Some more deets over on the official wiki. Goodness knows when it could release, but there’s usually a few of these before it all goes live and Mojang have been working out the deets on 1.12 since late last year.
YouTuber LowSpecGamer makes a living out of making games playable on the weakest computers, reducing games to their most basic visual components so they can run on rigs made of balsa wood and held together with duct tape. He’s already tackled a range of modern games, including The Witcher 3, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Dishonored, but his latest video — for Valve’s bona fide classic Half-Life 2 — represents his biggest graphical reduction yet.
By removing shadows, weapon effects, textures, water reflections, and even character teeth, LowSpecGamer makes Half-Life 2 look peculiarly like Minecraft. Vehicles, buildings, and mountains morph until they look like they’re built of that game’s pixellated blocks, so much so that you’d expect Gordon Freeman to pull out a pickaxe and dig his way out of City 17.
It might not be a hugely sustainable way to play Half-Life 2 — especially when the sky looks like a Lovecraftian nightmare hellscape — but it does make the game run like greased lightning on a PC the size of a USB stick. So tweakable is the 13-year-old game that the Intel Atom CPU powering the Intel Compute Stick barely breaks a sweat, and with almost every visual effect removed, is capable of running it at more than 160 frames per second. If you want to copy his methods, LowSpecGamer provides a handy guide for Half-Life 2, and many other games, through his YouTube channel.
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