Minecraft hits 1m sales

Mojang Specification's free-form building game Minecraft last night passed one million sales.

This means revenues of at least $13 million for the game, which was predominantly created by just one man, Markus Persson. While he has recently set up a full studio for Minecraft and future projects, creating and running the game is not believed to have been enormously costly to date.

The milestone figure comes before Minecraft has even achieved 'release' status - the bulk of sales happened while it was a €9.95 alpha build, with it switching to a €14.95 beta version just before Christmas.

Persson recently stated on his blog that that the $20 release status is likely to be achieved within 2011. "We've written down major goals that we want to do for Minecraft release, and it looks like the release will happen sometime late this year. Hopefully we'll be able to set a date soon."

Mojang has also pledged to "dedicate 50% of the development time in Minecraft towards adding fun new stuff. Basically, any developer working on the game (two people at the moment) can just come up with something they'd want to add on a day-to-day basis, as long as the rest of the team thinks it's a decent idea.

"If it ends up being fun, it gets added."

Minecraft's sales sit at 1003151 paying users at the time of writing, with 7438 of those purchases made within the last 24 hours. Including non-paying users (limited to the offline 'classic' version), the total playerbase is 3,180,608.