Minecraft sold 40 copies in its first weekend. The price was €10 (£8), and the game was an unfinished alpha built by a developer who still had a day job.
That detail comes from WIRED’s account of Markus Persson, known as Notch. Persson wrote a basic version over a weekend in May and posted about it on TIGSource, a forum for independent games. A month later he began charging €10 for downloads. Forty copies hardly looked like the start of anything. But the alpha was deliberately incomplete: the core gameplay existed and the rest did not, so Persson updated it every Friday, adding features. “Every time, sales rose,” WIRED wrote.
Why it caught on
Persson had his own explanation. “The main reason, I think, is because people talk about the game,” he told the magazine. Minecraft came with no instructions. A bed meant experimenting: wood slabs and wool bundles, three of each. And asking someone else was quicker. So players talked, and the forums, Twitter and Reddit filled up. He had long been active in TIGSource discussions and kept answering early players directly while expanding the game around what they built.
From side project to day job
The money changed his working life. Asked by PC Gamer when he realised Minecraft could be his job, Persson said it was “just a couple of months after opening up alpha sales.” People liked it, and it looked as if it could grow, so he dropped to working 40% part time at Jalbum.net. His employers, he said, came from a background of turning small hobby projects into real businesses and were understanding.
The full jump took another six months. He worked a three-month notice period, and when he left, rising Minecraft sales had made the choice look obvious.
That sequence, a cheap paid build sold before the game was finished and the income funding the next stage, is what people now call early access.
Sources
- Changing the game: how Notch made Minecraft a cult hit (WIRED)
- Community heroes: Notch, for Minecraft (PC Gamer)
