While Minecraft is known as a game, it is more akin to a digital sandbox, inside which players can construct anything they want, much of it out of block-shaped materials. The creative, rather than destructive, possibilities of Minecraft have caught the eyes of educators, who see it as a supplemental learning tool for everything from anatomy and earth science to math and literature.

In the Santa Ana Unified School District in Orange County, Calif., for example, elementary school students in social science classes have met up inside the game and recreated the features of local historical sites they have studied, such as the Mission of San Juan Capistrano. Students in science classes there have used it to demonstrate their understanding of building circuits.

Most of Minecraft’s appeal is as entertainment, though. There are more than 100 million registered Minecraft players. It is the top paid app, years after the game was introduced, on the two dominant mobile app stores from Apple and Google, and is the best-selling PC game of all time, according to Microsoft. More than 160 million people have watched over five billion hours of Minecraft videos on YouTube.

In short, Minecraft continues to be a huge success a year and a half after Microsoft bought Mojang, the Swedish creator of the game, for $2 billion. But it has not yet buttressed other Microsoft businesses the way company executives had hoped.

Some believed, for example, that making Minecraft available for Microsoft’s smartphones could give the struggling devices a lift. They are still struggling.