Minecraft – Pocket Edition was released for iOS in November 2011. Two and a bit years later, it's sitting proudly at the top of Apple's chart of the top paid iPhone and iPad apps of 2013 in both the UK and US.

An impressive achievement, as is the fact that the game has been one of the few paid – as opposed to freemium – titles to appear regularly in Apple's top-grossing charts during the year. With 16.5m mobile copies sold so far (including somewhere between 1m and 5m on Android according to Google's stats), Minecraft is a huge, long-lasting mobile game hit.

What's more, over time the Pocket Edition has been getting closer to its desktop parent. Updates in 2013 included baby animals, armour, fire, twinklier skies, and most recently the addition of minecarts and rails, as well as a "massively increased" view distance.

"The end goal is to make it as much like the PC version as possible. The next major milestone will be to get the endless worlds of the PC version, where it just continues to generate terrain all the time," Daniel Kaplan, business developer for Minecraft developer Mojang, told The Guardian in an interview.

Minecraft has also not-so-quietly become one of the most popular games in the world for children, who are using it at home, on their mobile devices and even in the classroom. That's one reason for its long period of popularity on the app stores, even if that wasn't developer Markus 'Notch' Persson's original intention.

"This wasn't planned to be a kids game from the beginning, and it's still not planned to be a kids game! It's a happy accident. When Notch started developing the game, he developed it for himself – he was thirtysomething – and there weren't any thoughts about how to make it child-friendly," said Kaplan.

"The vision is still not to try to make it child-friendly: when we design the game, we're not thinking 'how do children react to this?'. But maybe their big brother or sister plays it, and they want to be a part of that too. There wasn't really a specific plan for this to happen though."

Minecraft's Pocket Edition has stuck to its £4.99 since its launch: a decision that has paid off for Mojang, since those 16.5m mobile sales mean roughly £57.6m of revenues for the company from iOS and Android alone so far, after Apple and Google's cuts.

Did Mojang ever feel pressure to adopt the freemium business model that has become so lucrative for mobile gaming? Or at least add in-app purchases on top of the initial download fee? The Xbox 360 version sells customised "skin packs" as in-game purchases, but they've yet to transfer to mobile.

"I can't really say what will happen with Minecraft in the future. We definitely think that having one purchase, where you buy it once, is a good form – including good for parents," said Kaplan. "We don't intend to put in any features where if you buy them it will alter the game. We do some visual stuff in Minecraft on Xbox, but it's just visual."

For now, Mojang is continuing to add more features to Minecraft's Pocket Edition, while also preparing for the game's release on Sony's PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3 and PS Vita. It's now a gaming brand spanning desktop computers, consoles and mobile devices, with Kaplan saying it's nearing 10m sales on Xbox and 13m on desktop.

"The difference is when the games are released: the PC version came first, but by the time the other versions were released two years after, the community was so much bigger, so that's why they are catching up," he said.

"Approaching 10m sales on Xbox is crazy numbers, we definitely didn't think in terms of those kind of numbers when we released on Xbox in the beginning. But Android is doing good too, we are super-happy about that. A lot of people say you can't sell premium games on Android, but Minecraft maybe shows you don't need to make a free-to-play game to have a large community."

Is there a secret to Minecraft's mobile success? Make something wonderful, then listen to your players. The burgeoning Minecraft community is one reason why the game has remained so fresh, including for the people making it.

"Every week I see something new and weird being done in Minecraft: the community keeps on surprising us every week, and we are super-proud of them," said Kaplan. "We are out there, listening as much as we can and trying to facilitate the feedback into what we think is best. It's definitely a blessing to have this kind of big community."

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