Minecraft has sold 176 million copies, may be the best-selling game ever

Microsoft took the opportunity of Minecraft's 10th anniversary to announce their new AR game Minecraft Earth, and also casually mention that Mojang's voxel-em-up has now sold 176 million copies. That's across all platforms of course, including Minecraft: Pocket Edition on mobile, and it means Minecraft might now be the best-selling game of all time.

It's impossible to say for sure because nobody's willing to say exactly how many copies Tetris has sold, with estimated figures varying from 170 million to 425 million—depending who's doing the counting and which of the many versions available count as real Tetris.

The only other game to have crossed the 100 million line is Grand Theft Auto 5, which has sold 110 million copies. If you're jumping back into Minecraft in 2019, head over to our handy Minecraft update log to see what's new.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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