Minecraft

Minecraft is a sandbox video game created by Swedish game developer Markus Persson and released by Mojang in 2011. The game allows players to build with various blocks in a 3D procedurally generated world, requiring creativity from players. Other activities in the game include exploration, resource gathering, crafting, and combat. Minecraft is a creation game that allows users to create worlds or learn to survive in pre-generated worlds.

The word Minecraft is a portmanteau of the verbs to mine and to craft. The "mining" activity consists of punching and retrieving dirt blocks. Once enough blocks are retrieved, the "crafting" begins, in which a player combines the resources they have mined to create more complex tools. Mining for wood (punching a tree) enables the player to create basic tools, which are used to mine more complex resources, items, and tools.

Multiple gameplay modes are available:

• Survival mode: Players must acquire resources to build the world and maintain health.
• Creative mode: Players have unlimited resources to build with and the ability to fly.
• Adventure mode: Players can play custom maps created by other players with certain restrictions.
• Spectator mode: Players can freely move throughout a world without being affected by gravity and collisions or without being allowed to destroy or build anything.
• Hardcore mode: This is similar to survival mode, but the player is given only one life, and the game difficulty is locked on the hardest difficulty. If the player dies on hardcore, the player does not respawn, and the world is locked to spectator mode.

Minecraft has received critical acclaim and has won numerous awards and accolades, including BAFTA awards, Kids' Choice Awards, an MTV VMA Award, and Golden Joystick Awards. Social media, parodies, adaptations, merchandise, and the MineCon and Minecraft Live conventions have played large roles in popularizing the game.

By 2023, 600 million copies of Minecraft have been sold, with 140 million monthly active players. The period of the COVID-19 pandemic saw an uptick in users, with active players growing by over 14 million from 2020 to 2021. The game generated $102.6 in mobile revenue in 2022, and over its lifetime, Minecraft has generated over $3 billion in revenue in-game sales alone.

In September 2014, Microsoft announced a deal to buy Mojang and the Minecraft intellectual property for USD$2.5 billion, with the acquisition completed two months later. Microsoft expanded the game to players across multiple platforms, including Microsoft's Xbox, added new features and content, and launched an educational version of the game for classroom use—Minecraft Education Edition.

Games in the franchise include the following:

• Minecraft Legends—Released in 2023, this game is Minecraft's first real-time strategy (RTS) game.
• Minecraft: Story Mode—Minecraft's first story-based content, as a "click-and-point-adventure" game. It was created with Telltale games and released in 2015 and lasted two seasons.
• Minecraft: Earth—This was a free-to-play sandbox game for iOS and Android, released in 2019. It used the player's location and was similar to Pokemon GO with a Minecraft spin, with players walking around the real world and virtually gathering resources, fighting mobs, and solving puzzles. The game was ended by Mojang after three years, in June 2021.
• Minecraft Dungeons—This dungeon crawler game was released in 2020 and features gameplay in which players fight through procedurally generated dungeons, collect loot, and level up their characters. They can do this solo or with friends.

Minecraft Legends trailer