Minecraft sells 20 million copies on the PC

Notch has left the building, as they say, but the Minecraft machine just keeps on printing money. The sales counter at Minecraft.net broke the 20 million mark today, and that's just on the PC.

The moment was commemorated by Mojang's Patrick Geuder, who tweeted a photo of other Mojang employees taking photos of the Big Two-Oh. Amazingly, that number is on top of the 20 million copies sold across Xbox platforms, which as Gamespot reported was achieved in May.

Markus "Notch" Persson, the creator of Minecraft, left the game and Mojang behind last year, shortly after Microsoft acquired the company for $2.5 billion. But his departure clearly hasn't had an adverse impact on the game's popularity: It grew from 13 million at the end of 2013 to 18.3 million at the start of 2015. And again, that's just on the PC, and doesn't take into account the Xbox, PlayStation, iOS, or Android versions.

Interestingly, while Mojang employees seem pretty excited about the milestone, Mojang itself has, so far at least, let it slip past without mention: The studio ran two blog posts today, one about forthcoming LittleBigPlanet DLC (exclusive to the PlayStation version of the game, naturally) and the other about a console update that will go live tomorrow. Ah, well.

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.