Wish It Was Ours: Minecraft Nets Creator $350,000 in One Day

Posted 09/28/2010 at 7:58pm | by Nathan Grayson

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Rome wasn't built in a day, but Minecraft creator Markus Persson's fortune was. And continues to be. The indie building sensation – which turns players loose in a world full of angry beasts that go bump in the night and challenges them to build if they want to survive – quickly found its way to roughly 4,000 copies sold per day. Impressive, huh? No, not really, as it turns out. At least, not when compared to September 22, when – if sales were already on fire – they finally up and exploded.

Prior to that, developer Mojang was forced to offer the game for free for couple days while it mended its busted servers, which finally snapped under the pressure of supporting such a rapidly growing game. The result of that unintentional appetizer? Everyone wanted to get their hands on the main course. And so, in one day, sales skyrocketed to 26,000 copies – a grand total of roughly $350,000. That – for those of you who still have one more “woah” hovering on the tip of your tongue and need somewhere to aim it – means roughly one copy sold every three seconds.

The best part? Persson's pretty much a one-man show. And even though 26,000 is still the record, sales have mostly hovered between 15,000 and 10,000 per day ever since. So, how's the surprise winner of the game development lottery taking his newfound mountain of money?

"It all feels unreal. I thought I could make a living from the game, but I did not expect to become rich,” Persson said in a recent interview.

Sort of like how this guy didn't expect for his house to catch on fire. Or no one expected these people to build the entirety of BioShock: Infinite's Colombia. But Minecraft enables all that and tons more – and it's not even in beta yet! Million dollar idea, you say? That might be selling the game a bit short.