Minecraft – the biggest game ever

Combined sales of Minecraft have reached a staggering 54 million, putting the game only behind Wii Sports in the all-time rankings.

Usually when we talk about best-selling games we use the caveat ‘non-bundled’, because many of the biggest sellers are Nintendo games that came included with a new console – whether you wanted it or not.

But that barely matters to Minecraft, whose sales have now surpassed Super Mario Bros. on the NES and Tetris on the Game Boy. The only game it hasn’t outside is Wii Sports, which is on around 82 million worldwide (and wasn’t bundled in Japan).

Minecraft has a long way to go to beat that, but with Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PS Vita versions still to be released this year you wouldn’t really bet against it.


And the games not even out on Xbox One and PS4 yet…

There’s no breakdown of sales per format, but according to Mojang’s Patrick Geuder combined console sales have now surpassed that of the PC – which for the first few years was the only format the game was available on.



The best-selling (and cheapest, and worst quality) version though is Minecraft: Pocket Edition which back in April had sold 21 million. At that point the PC version was on 15 million and the Xbox 360 on 12 million.

Since official figures are not always released there is no agreed on list of the best-selling games of all-time, especially as some sources, such as Wikipedia, count all the various versions of Tetris as one – which seems wrong to us as they’re often quite different games from different developers.

The current top 10 though is believed to be something like this:

1. Wii Sports (Wii) – 82 million

2. Minecraft (various) – 54 million

3. Super Mario Bros. (NES) – 40.24 million

4. Mario Kart Wii (Wii) – 35.53 million

5. Wii Sports Resort (Wii) – 32.37 million

6. Grand Theft Auto V (360/PS3) – 32.5 million*

7. Pokémon Red/Blue (GB) – 31.37 million

8. New Super Mario Bros. (DS) – 30.38 million

9. Tetris (GB) – 30.26 million

10. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (360/PS3/PC) – 28.5 million

* figure is shipped not sold, so knock a million or so off for now

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