UPDATED 00:59 EDT / JANUARY 13 2015

Microsoft Buys Game Favorite Minecraft NEWS

Minecraft saw 1.4 million concurrent users on Saturday

Microsoft Buys Game Favorite Minecraft

The ever-growing phenomena of Minecraft continues to dominate its own niche of the industry and has already well solidified itself as a cultural touchstone. Even Microsoft Corporation’s purchase of Mojang AB, the Swedish development studio of the block-centric sandbox game, has not slowed this cultural juggernaut.

Polygon reports that Saturday Minecraft developer Nathan Adams, aka Dinnerbone, told them that Minecraft had peaked at 1.4 million concurrent users.

On Saturday, Adams went to Twitter to announce his astonishment at the number of concurrent users, which was approaching one million.

Five minutes later he tweeted that it had exceeded one million and that “exactly 50 percent of players are in [single player] at any moment.”

Adam’s username is also well known to Minecraft players because naming any animal or creature in Minecraft “Dinnerbone” will cause it to appear upside-down, similar to Adam’s Twitter portrait.

Also recently, Valve Corporation’s digital distribution platform Steam reached 8.5 million concurrent players, but no single game on the platform exceeded one million players. Having previously reached the 6 million mark in November 2012, this year has seen huge growth for online gaming and digital delivery.

Minecraft has a massive following and since launch has sold over 55 million copies for the PC—the game is also available on PC and mobile—and early last year boasted over 100 million registered users.

Image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minecraft_Volume_Alpha.jpg

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