Written by, Mihajlo Trajcheski
Updated June, 3, 2022
Minecraft, the brainchild of Markus “Notch” Persson, is a sandbox video game that has taken the world by storm ever since its release.
But, how many people play Minecraft exactly, what’s the Minecraft target audience, what age group plays it the most, and what’s its revenue?
Let’s look at the numbers.
(PlayerCounter) (TechACake)
According to a Minecraft live player count, the current number of Minecraft daily players exceeds 3 million. In 2022, the number of daily active players has been fluctuating between 2.8 million and 3.6 million.
(Business of Apps) (Minecraft Wiki)
The Chinese version of Minecraft, which is free to play, surpassed 400 million registered players in the world back in 2020. According to Minecraft Wiki, ‘Minecraft: China edition’ has more than 500 million players as of October 2021.
(Statista)
Minecraft had a slow start at the beginning, but its numbers have been gradually growing ever since its release. The game counted 40 million active users in 2016, and 91 million in 2018, and now has more than 140 million active players worldwide.
(Activeplayer.IO)
According to numbers from the Minecraft player count, Minecraft saw a record of more than 16 million players in January 2022– more than any other month in the last 3 years. In May, the average count of Minecraft monthly players surpassed 173 million.
(HowLongToBeat)
On average, Minecraft active players spend between 70 and 270 hours per week playing the game. Most players dedicate around 90h to the main story only.
(The Telegraph) (GamesRadar+)
Minecraft popularity is partly due to the in-game events that players can enjoy in the online world. One such event was the ‘Secret Sky’ festival organized by DJ Porter Robinson, which drew 4 million views and raised $116K for the MusiCares Covid-19 relief fund.
(HowLongToBeat)
More than half of the players that took part in a survey said they prefer playing Minecraft on PC rather than any other device. The second most popular option is PlayStation4 (only 9%), while the least popular device for Minecraft players is the Xbox Series X/S (0.2%).
(Minecraft Maps)
Minecraft stats show that with close to 3 million downloads, ‘Skyblock’ is the most popular Minecraft map, followed by ‘Cube Survival’ and ‘Parkour School’. ‘Assassin’s Creep’ has a little under 6 thousand downloads.
Other popular maps include ‘Hogwarts’, ‘Middle Earth’, and ‘Jurassic World’.
(IMDb)
Between 2011 and 2020, Minecraft received 14 nominations and won 11 game awards. Its first-ever was the ‘The best independent game’ in 2011 and the most recent one was the 2020 ‘Kids’ Choice Award for Favorite Video Game’.
(Statista)
The majority of children in the UK between the ages of 12 and 15 play either Minecraft or Fortnite. The same is true for 78% of 8-11-year-olds, and 23% of 3-4-year-olds.
(Minecraft Building Inc)
According to the numbers, Minecraft is not as popular among girls as it is among boys. Between the ages of 3 and 12, 54% of players are boys and the disparity is even larger in the 6-8 age group, where only 29% of the players are girls and 68% are boys.
(PCGamesN)
Microsoft’s head of Minecraft Helen Chiang revealed in an interview with Edge Magazine that the average Minecraft player is 24 years old, contrary to popular belief that the game skews towards the younger audience.
(The Conversation)
About 80% of Minecraft’s younger audience prefers to play the game with friends, siblings, and parents. While not many, some parents do play Minecraft with their children.
(PlayerCounter)
Five countries dominate the Minecraft world, and according to Minecraft player statistics, the UK Is in those five countries (by daily participation.) The United States is at the top of the list, making up 21.21% of the daily participants, followed by Brazil at 6.17% and Russia with 5.59%.
(Minecraft Server Statistics)
Minecraft server statistics by region show that the US has the highest number of Minecraft servers (1,690). The UK is in second place, with 1,109 registered servers. Germany has 492 servers, and Russia has only 196 Minecraft servers.
(Business of Apps)
After the release of the game in 2011, the company reported a global Minecraft revenue of $211 million the very next year in 2012. That number reached over $400 million in 2020.
(Statista)
In 2015, the global revenue for Minecraft sales of the mobile version raked in $82 million. Six years later, in 2021, the mobile app earned the company a little over $160 million.
The lowest revenue registered during the 2015-2021 period was between 2016 and2017 when the total worldwide revenue for the mobile Minecraft version made a little over $70 million worldwide.
(Statista)
Minecraft reached one million sales in less than a month after its launch. By May 2020, the company recorded 200 million Minecraft copies sold worldwide and by 2021, that number reached over 238 million.
(Sensor Tower)
Numbers from Sensor Tower show that Minecraft continues to attract more players, including those that prefer gaming on their phones. The app was downloaded more than 200K times worldwide in April this year and is estimated to have earned $6 million worldwide.
(Esports Charts)
Based on Esports Charts’ Minecraft statistic, ‘Twitch Rivals Squidcraft Games ft. Komanche is the most-watched tournament in Minecraft, with nearly 18 million hours of viewership. For comparison, most MC Championships (at least the recent ones) recorded about 2 million views each.
(Esports Earnings)
The highest prize pool in a Minecraft tournament is $100,000, with the lowest being $1.000. Since the beginning of Minecraft tournaments, the company has given out a total of $444 million collectively for 21 tournaments.
(SullyGnome)
With an average of around 30,000 viewings per month (in 2022), Minecraft continues to be one of the most popular games on Twitch. However, there seems to have been a drop in viewership on the platform this year, considering that the average number of viewings in 2021 was 80,000 a month.
(SullyGnome)
Twitch ranking in May 2022 (based on monthly viewership) puts Minecraft in 14th place, with 24.9 million viewers. The most viewed game on Twitch of the month is ‘Just Chatting’ which has 257 million monthly players, followed by ‘League of Legends’ with 140,2 million views, and ‘Grand Theft Auto V’ with around 120 million viewers.
(SullyGnome)
Minecraft user statistics from March, April, and May of 2022, the most popular Minecraft streamer is Jdm2088, from Korea, who only has 353,084 followers but has recorded 1,816,295 hours in watch-time. In second place is BastiGHG, from Germany, who has 1,069,736 followers and 1,637,390 hours in watch-time.
(Siachen Studios)
One of the most followed Minecraft YouTuber creators, DanTDM, has over 26 million subscribers and a total of 18.5 billion viewers on his main channel. The second most popular Minecraft Youtuber creator, Dream, has 28.2 million subscribers and has recorded 2.97 billion views.
(BlueStacks) (TwitchTracker) (HyperAuditor)
The most watched British female Minecraft YouTuber is LDShadowLady, who currently boasts 6.83 million subscribers on her platform and averages around 1.7 million views on her videos.
(BlueStacks) (TwitchTracker)
The most watched female Minecraft streamer on Twitch is Nihachu. She is the oldest female member of the Dream SMP and has more than 1 million followers on the platform. Minecraft is her second most streamed game, with more than 429 hours of stream time and 119,682 maximum viewers per stream.
(Guinness World Records) (Guinness World Records)
British Minecraft creator TommyInnit has, so far, broken two records on Twitch.
He first broke the record for the highest gameplay viewership in January 2021, when 650,000 people tuned in to watch his commentary on the finale of Dream SMP, and he later became the most followed channel on the platform, with 5.2 million followers.
(Speedrun.com)
The current Minecraft speedrun record holder is Cube 1337x, who set an in-game time of 9m and 08s, almost a year after Brentilda set a record time of 9m and 36s.
Minecraft is undoubtedly one of the most-played games in the world. With thousands of worlds to explore, millions of online tournaments, and in-game festivals, the game has everything you would expect for an online world to have and more, and based on the numbers, it’s likely to stay around for quite some time.
Since Minecraft’s release, the game has amassed 141 million active players from around the globe, though most of its players are from the US, UK, and Brazil.
Minecraft reported global revenue of $415 in 2020 alone.
Minecraft popularity statistics show that with close to 240 million sales worldwide, it is one of the most played games of all time.
The numbers vary but based on numbers available for 2022, more than 126 million people play Minecraft monthly.
In 2022, between 2.8 million and 3.6 million players tune in to play Minecraft daily.
As someone who grew up gaming and always had a love for random facts, being able to write about gaming and technology for a living has been an absolute treat. Whenever I’m not researching my next topic for Don’t Disappoint Me, I am deflecting the attacks of Bosses in Sekiro, investigating a murder in Disco Elysium, helping Zagreus escape the underworld in Hades, or flanking enemies in Call of Duty with my squad. Having studied English language and literature has helped me merge these two worlds of random facts and gaming into a fulfilling career.