While publishers scramble to churn out annual iterations of me-too clones for the latest hotness (in this case, that would be Call of Duty) other indie developers are working hard to make real games that people actually enjoy playing, such as Mojang's Minecraft, which has effectively sold more than 8 million copies on PC alone.
PC GamesN spotted the post over on Mojang's official blog, where the counter shows that more than 8,000,139 people have purchased Minecraft, as of the publishing of this article.
The game itself is pretty much what the name entails: Players craft any and everything they want in their own little procedurally generated game world. You can craft any and everything thanks to mods, expansions and a few tutorials. Gamers have designed everything from Harry Potter's Hogwarts Castle to the Lord of the Ring's Minas Tirith, and everything else in between.
The game has also been moving massive copies on the Xbox 360, with more than 3 million copies moved over the course of the summer. Again, Mojang managed to do this on a shoestring budget and no mass marketing.
Then again, DayZ helped Bohemia Interactive move more than a million copies of Arma II over the course of the summer with a $0 marketing budget, too. Just positive word of mouth and a strong internet community.
Notch has moved on to bigger and potentially better things with his work on 0x10c, but it's still too early to tell if the emergent space game will be anywhere near as popular as Minecraft.
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