The numbers are jaw-dropping:FlowerChild wrote:Sure they can man. MC is still selling a million units every few months. You can see it just sold another million in the news items on MCF. What is that, 25 million dollars gross?Shengji wrote: Me too! I don't understand why such drastic development continues on the game after its release. It's almost as if Notch is paying an in house modding team, surely current sales cannot pay their wages?
It probably doesn't cost more than a couple of hundred thousand a year to keep MC development going the way it is now.
I certainly don't approve of the current direction in which MC is going, and I'd personally be in heaven if they just stopped developing it entirely, but at the same time, I sincerely doubt it's not cost effective for them to keep going the way they are.
http://www.slashgear.com/minecraft-sale ... -11264932/
That's probably close to 200 or 300 million dollars for 2012 alone. Their profit margins have to be absolutely insane, too, considering that they only have like 10 or 20 people on the staff, and pay almost nothing for advertising -- even if they're paying 100 million dollars for server costs (and they aren't), that's a pile of money left over.In all, the PC/Mac version of Minecraft brought in 4,177,843 sales throughout the year, which isn’t bad for a game that has been available for a number of years already.
Of course, while the PC version’s sales were impressive, they couldn’t top the sales of the Xbox 360 version. Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition was purchased 100,416 times on Christmas day, jumping up to 325,591 sales during the larger Christmas week. 5,002,370 sales was the final tally for Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition, which again is something that we already knew.
With the huge number of people getting a new smartphone or tablet on Christmas day, it definitely isn’t surprising that the sales for Minecraft: Pocket Edition managed to come in on top of the Xbox 360 and PC versions. The mobile version of Minecraft netted 283,939 sales on Christmas day, 706,419 on Christmas week, and 5,899,727 for 2012 as a whole. Both iOS and Android sales are counted in this figure, so it would appear that Mojang is cleaning up across all platforms.
Add up all of those numbers for 2012, and we come to 15,079,940 sales for all versions of Minecraft in 2012. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars for Mojang, so the studio is definitely sitting pretty as we head into 2013.
Interesting breakdown on the money, though -- the vast majority of going it is going straight to Notch's bank account, not the company.
So, considering that profits doubled this year (according to the same article) -- that's about 160 million dollars going straight to Notch's bank account, and only $20 million going to mojang itself. For some perspective, Zynga is pulling in 4 times that amount of revenue while losing money, and it's worth almost 2 billion dollars. I don't have a clue what Mojang would be worth if it went public, but I would wager 'a lot'.last year, the majority of profits went straight to Notch Development—Perssons' own company—rather than Mojang itself. MCV states the 425 million SEK ($63.5 million) of the total 550 million SEK ($82.2 million) went to Notch Development). Now with the company's massive increase in yearly profits, much of the money will go straight to Mojang since the company has officially taken over the IP from Persson.