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Fortnite isn't top dog yet - Minecraft is now pushing 90 million monthly active users

The second-highest selling game of all time found an extra 20 million monthly users in 2018

Fortnite isn't top dog yet - Minecraft is now pushing 90 million monthly active users

Minecraft continues to attract over 91 million active users monthly, according to Microsoft.

While Fortnite has exploded into popularity in recent years, Epic’s battle royale phenomenon is “only” hosting a monthly active user count of around 78 million.

Microsoft’s latest figures claim that Mojang’s block-building classic has sold 154 million units, making Minecraft the second-best-selling game of all time behind Tetris.

That won’t include the 100 million Chinese players when it comes to the game’s overall audience - NetEase’s China release of Minecraft is free-to-play.

Building blocks

Microsoft famously bought Minecraft developer Mojang for $2.5 billion back in 2014.

But despite the game’s continued success, there are no plans for a sequel on the table. Instead, Microsoft wants future titles to act more like enhancements to the original, such as the upcoming dungeon-crawler Minecraft: Dungeons.

"The way that we've decided to expand - and I think Dungeons is the first example of that - is a way that we're trying to keep our community together," said Microsoft’s Minecraft head Helen Chiang in conversation with Business Insider.

"That's why our updates are free. We don't want to ask [players] to move from 'Minecraft 1' to 'Minecraft 2.' We want them to just enjoy 'Minecraft.' And there are other ways that we can expand that are more meaningful and authentic to what we want to be, rather than just releasing another iteration in the way that most other franchises do."


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Staff Writer

Natalie Clayton is an Edinburgh-based freelance writer and game developer. Besides PCGamesInsider and Pocketgamer.biz, she's written across the games media landscape and was named in the 2018 GamesIndustry.biz 100 Rising Star list.