Almost 1 Million People Were Playing Minecraft This Morning

It’s a given these days that most games collect information about you as you play. The depth of data can range from where you click on the screen, to dialogue choices, to the amount of time you spend in certain areas. The simplest of metrics though is arguably “current players”, a figure Minecraft developer Mojang recently plugged into for its sandbox builder.

Mojang’s Nathan Adams tweeted the news today:

For the first time ever, we finally have the capability to see how many people are currently playing Minecraft right now. Holy crap.

— Nathan Adams (@Dinnerbone) January 9, 2015

He also followed up with a rather large and juicy figure:

There are currently over 998,000 people playing Minecraft right at this moment. It is not even remotely close to being a peak time.

— Nathan Adams (@Dinnerbone) January 9, 2015

Yes, that’s 998,000. Almost 1 million. Going by the tweet’s post time, this number was plucked at around 1am in Australia, or 6am Friday in California — so yep, hardly what you’d call peak times. It’d be interesting to see this number in the evening on a weekday and / or weekend. It’d be bigger… potentially a lot bigger.

Sure it’s got nothing on Steam, but keep in mind that Mojang’s stats only include players on Windows, OS X and Linux with version 1.3 and greater. I’m sure if it included consoles, mobile and those who play offline… well, I think it’d give Steam a run for its money.

@Dinnerbone [Twitter, via Reddit]