- Who
- Minecraft, Mojang
- What
- 300,000,000 unit(s) sold
- Where
- Not Applicable ()
- When
The best-selling videogame of all time is Minecraft, which was confirmed to have surpassed 300 million in sales by publisher Microsoft on 15 October 2023.
Minecraft was originally coded by Swedish software developer Markus "Notch" Persson, who released a rough "alpha" build on 17 May 2009 and – in light of the game's fast-rising popularity – switched to a paid-for commercial release (under the company name Mojang Specifications) on 13 June of that year. Persson stepped away from day-to-day involvement with Minecraft in 2011 and resigned from Mojang (Sweden) – the company he founded – in 2014, not long after its sale to Microsoft was finalized.
Given its huge and devoted fanbase, it is perhaps not surprising that the gameplay of Minecraft has undergone few significant changes in the last decade. The most recent update was "Trails & Tales", which went live on 7 June 2023. This added various new environments and creatures (known as "mobs") as well as a new feature, buried ruins, which are seeded randomly in each newly created world.
It could be argued that Tetris, which has sold around 70 million physical copies as well 425 million digital downloads, is a higher selling game. However, there is no single build of Tetris. Instead, those half a billion sales are divided between numerous licensed variations on Alexey Pajitnov's original 1985 design.
