14 DAY TRIAL // Developer Mojang has revealed that Minecraft Pocket Edition has just surpassed 30 million downloads on Android and iOS.
The game became a veritable cultural phenomenon from its early days, after popularizing the notion of buying early access into a title that is constantly evolving. The game saw a massive success with the creative crowd, being in many ways a younger generation's virtual Lego.
"Let's put that into perspective: if each Pocket Edition sale was an average sized dog, and you walked said dog every day with a retractable leash in moderate temperatures across uneven terrain, it would consume approximately 290,566,788^3 kj of energy. I know. It's a big number," the announcement post points out.
Now the company reveals yet another stunning feat, and it wants to reward its legions of fans with a planned question and answer session with the developers, to be broadcast live on the Internet.
If you're interested to see what people are going to be talking about or desire to submit your own questions, you can head over to the appropriate Reddit thread and do so.
The dev livestream will be broadcast later this week, selecting the top voted and least offensive questions to answer.
A pretty big pixelated deal
Minecraft is also available on Xbox and PlayStation consoles, as well as PC and Mac, and the total sales figures are somewhat staggering.
The company published some of its internal data over the course of 2014, showing that that game had sold around 15 million units on PC, 12 million units on Xbox 360, and over 1 million units on PlayStation 3, as of April last year.
Global sales for the video game surpassed 54 million worldwide in June 2014, and taking into account the fact that Minecraft also landed on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation Vita devices in October and November, the number must be significantly higher now.
Microsoft purchased the Minecraft franchise for an incredible amount of money, which the company is confident it can recoup in no time.
Whether the company wants to deliver the game to its mobile app store or not, it's still money well spent, if only it manages not to alienate the existing user base.
Minecraft manages to top 1 million concurrent users on a daily basis, and that's not at peak times, which goes to show what a powerful franchise it is, and its huge potential for growth.
