Nearly seven years on from its 1.0 release and more than a decade beyond its original alpha debut, Minecraft is still one of the most popular games in the world. While League of Legends is debatably the most popular hardcore PC title and modern games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds have stolen the limelight in recent months, Minecraft still maintains a staggeringly large player base considering its age.
In the month of December alone, more than 74 million people around the world played Minecraft at some point or another. That includes players across all platforms -- PC, consoles, mobile devices and more -- and shows a supremely enduring popularity. It's also an impressively large portion of the overall playerbase. With 144 million copies sold, more than half of the people who bought Minecraft at one point in time continue to play it on a regular basis. That's more than can be said for almost any game out there.
Indeed the playerbase is actually growing because that 74 million figure is a new record for Minecraft. That must be encouraging for Microsoft, which spent $2.5 billion on the property more than three years ago, with many questioning how it could possibly hope to recoup such an investment. While it may take it many years still to do so, owning Minecraft and its parent company, Mojang, certainly hasn't been a hardship for the long-time software developer.
Moving forward, the Minecraft creative organization will continue to update the game, with several big content patches planned in 2018, including a large ocean overhaul that's set to debut in the coming Spring, as per PCG.
Do you guys still play Minecraft?
