

Minecraft turns 3 years old, sells 13,000 copies in a day - citricsquid
http://www.minecraftforum.net/news/497-minecraft-turns-3-years-old-today/

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staunch
A popular indie game is not so surprising. What's surprising is the sheer
magnitude of the profits: $359,000 in daily profits -- a $131 million profit
run rate. Pure profit. It's conceivable that Notch will become a cash
billionaire over the next few years if the growth continues. That's just
insane.

~~~
slurgfest
Seeing Minecraft's profits makes it abundantly clear how much game industry
money is being extracted by middlemen, big men and other parasites.

~~~
idspispopd
Especially when you consider that Notch split his $3M cash dividend across his
staff - I don't know if it was staggered across the roles, but on average it
would be roughly $125k a piece.

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hkmurakami
Minecraft is one of the few modern examples of Gave Design triumphing over
Graphics. That alone is enough to make me cheer wildly for every positive news
I hear about Minecraft.

I want to thank Notch and the team for making/extending this game, and the
players for making it popular. It brings me hope that this _counterculture_
can grow stronger in the years to come.

~~~
kiba
Gave Design should be "Game Design".

~~~
johnchristopher
I think it makes an interesting and appropriate typo :)

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doctoboggan
I have been interested in the rise of minecraft, so about 3 months ago I
started scrapping some stats from the website and forums every day. I grabbed
total users, total paid users, forum post count and forum member count.

You can see that data here: <http://pastebin.com/W8AhzfK8>

I haven't been doing it for very long, so there is nothing of great interest
in the data, other than the crazy amount of money that Notch must be making.

~~~
citricsquid
If you ever want to do cool analysis let me know, I can provide you about a
years worth of forum history, can't help with the minecraft.net side though,
but there must be someone with the data out there!

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nhangen
Amazing...truly amazing.

Startups are inspiring, but this is one of my favorite success stories of the
decade.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
Successful startups and Minecraft seem have quite a bit in common:
[http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/15/a-brief-explanation-of-
why-...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/15/a-brief-explanation-of-why-
minecraft-matters/)

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teamonkey
Minecraft.net has a stats page here: <http://www.minecraft.net/stats>

    
    
       28,850,178 registered users, of which 5,884,899 (20.40%) have bought the game.
       
       In the last 24 hours, 125,974 people registered, and 13,337 people bought the game.
    

Approximately 5374 sales a day.

~~~
coryl
I'm assuming you calculated the average sales/day over the time period since
day 1? When did they first launch btw?

~~~
teamonkey
Good question. I just assumed 3 full calendar years. I'm pretty sure that the
'birthdate' is when Notch went public with the project and people started
being able to play it, but I don't know if that's the same date that people
could _pay_ for it.

It had multiple price points so it's hard to estimate profit. People who
bought the game early (like me) paid significantly less than the current $26
price.

~~~
idspispopd
There are a few historical graphs showing the sales (the wiki keeps track of
the various price points too), however I'm yet to find a graph for the whole 3
year period.

[http://crafthub.net/wp-
content/uploads/2010/10/purchaseandre...](http://crafthub.net/wp-
content/uploads/2010/10/purchaseandregistered1.png)

Remembering here that Paypal froze Notch's account in September 2010, and even
then there was 600K Euro in there.

~~~
citricsquid
Heh, that screenshot is from my website. The utility I built that used to
track the sales (during the period of that screenshot) was turned off once
minecraft.net became unreliable (used to crash and I didn't have things in
place to avoid data corruption). I wish I had kept it going, would have been
great to have it still.

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idspispopd
Just for curiosity sake. What's HN's opinion on Minecraft keeping a regular
level of sales into the long term. Noting that it's an ongoing development
title (and that's a large part of the continuing appeal.)

My observations on /r/minecraft and the minecraft forum reveal that while
there is a solid base, the vocal majority of posters seem to be green.

~~~
tobtoh
Whilst I'm sure the growth rate will slow, I think there is potential for it
to hit a consistent long term growth trend.

Minecraft is basically a modern version of Lego - and Lego has for the most
part been consistently popular and sells well. There is a constant batch of
new customers (ie kids) who will always enjoy the freedom of exercising their
imagination and building their own worlds.

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jlgreco
As someone that only really learned about minecraft fairly recently, that old
tech demo video of minecraft from 3 years ago was rather interesting. Is
anyone aware of perhaps a series of videos that document its progression?

~~~
pyrotechnick
There's a documentary in the making.

~~~
pyrotechnick
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2pp/minecraft-the-
story-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2pp/minecraft-the-story-of-
mojang)

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bryanh
Anyone have insights on how they ported a JVM game to Xbox 360?

~~~
citricsquid
As msarchet stated it was a rewrite. The game wasn't built by Mojang but an
external studio (<http://4jstudios.com> /
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4J_Studios>).

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danso
Congrats! I've been tempted to get the iOS version, maybe this milestone will
compel me to do so.

The only indie-game-story I respect as highly is Dwarf Fortress. It's hard to
imagine how that dense gameplay could ever make a sales breakthrough but what
incredible game design it is

~~~
poglet
The game engine was going to be used by Notch as a '3D Dwarf Fortress' but
ended up turning into Minecraft. I wish I could have seen it as Dwarf
Fortress.

Also worth checking out is a game called Towns.

