Minecraft is still going, still strong, and still relevant – the creative playground sees over 90 million monthly users, according to Microsoft.
Microsoft’s $2.5 billion (£1.9bn) purchase of Mojang back in 2014 was a huge sum to pay for what was, in essence, a one-game studio. But it’s paying off: in 2018 alone the monthly player count has increased by around 20 million.
With all this ongoing success, talk inevitably turns to a sequel – but Microsoft’s head of Minecraft, Helen Chiang, told Business Insider it doesn’t make sense for the game or community: “It’s something that always fractures the community,” she said.
“We don’t want to ask [players] to move from Minecraft 1 to Minecraft 2,” she explained, “We want them to just enjoy Minecraft. And there’s other ways that we can expand that are more meaningful and authentic to what we want to be, rather than just releasing another iteration in the way that most other franchises do.”
Said ‘other way’ refers to Minecraft: Dungeons, the first new game developed in-house at Mojang since the original Minecraft’s release in 2011. It’s not a sequel, and it’s not the sort of thing Mojang would expect to eat into the 90m-plus player base.
While Minecraft’s numbers are still gigantic and it is managing to maintain interest even as it approaches a decade in age, the relative new kid on the block Fortnite is hot on its heels with dozens of millions of players a month for Epic’s battle royale.