Minecraft Sales Numbers Hit 500,000 Units

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Minecraft is the indie game that has taken the gaming world by storm in the past few weeks. It’s sort of a open-ended building game with simplistic 16-bit style huge blocks. Yet, the sandbox-style possibility for creativity has really gotten a lot of people interested in the game. And while big AAA video game titles struggle to get sales, Minecraft has ‘sold’ 500,00 copies of the game.

Of the 1.6 million registered users, 500,000 have bought the game. While still 70% of the users are playing for free, it’s good to see that almost half a million people have supporting independent game development and pitched out the $10 to support creator Markus Perrson, who’s turning the income into starting a proper studio.

Perrson told Develop magazine in an interview that he always wanted to work on games for a living. While many indie games start off free and charge later, Perrson said he was quick to add a paid version of the game to “just get that out of the way as early as possible.” For the record, Perrson does plan to eventually phase out the free version of Minecraft, seeing as how the game is currently “in alpha”.

Perrson has started “Mojang Specifications”, his new studio, which will work on another new project as well as continuing work on Minecraft. He’d like to add an “overarching narrative” to the single player game (really) and continue to add features, like “monster towns” and alchemy.

You’ve got to find to interesting that Perrson is having success. Remember Crysis, the super-expensive and graphics-intensive sequel to Far Cry only sold like 75,000 copies in its first month, something that was blamed on the high graphics requirements and piracy. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have Perrson and Minecraft selling games by the virtual truckload.

Have you tried Minecraft? Do you think Perrson can keep its success going in the future?