Rounding up the first week back at work in 2013, we have two stories highlighting the way the global video games market has changed – and how it promises to continue changing in 2013…
First up, Minecraft. Every reader should, by now, be familiar with Mojang’s LEGO-em-up. A combination of virtual world builder, role playing game and infinite LEGO set, players can build, collaborate and make anything from hills, mountains and landscapes, through to epic sky palaces made of lava, 8-bit processors, life size Star Trek starships and entire recreations of other games within its imaginarium of awesome.
4J Studios is the Scottish company responsible for the Xbox Live Arcade version of the game which, it was revealed yesterday, outsold the original PC version of Minecraft in 2012.
Mojang, the original creator of Minecraft released the following figures for 2012:
- Xbox Live Arcade: 5,002,370
- PC: 4,177,843
- Pocket Edition (Mobile): 5,899,727
- Annual total 15,079,940
Sales over the Christmas period were also significant. On Christmas Day itself, 70,808 people bought Minecraft (PC), 100,416 people bought Minecraft (XBLA) and 283,939 bought Minecraft (Pocket Edition).
That’s a total of 455,163 sales on Christmas day itself.
This is in keeping with the mobile market, which saw its biggest ever Christmas day download numbers which jumped 87% from 2011 and drove huge number through the various app stores across the holiday period. Not to mention 17,000,000 new iOS and Android devices activated on Christmas day.
Which brings us neatly to the Apple App market. On Monday this week Apple announced that it had reached an unprecedented 40 BILLION app downloads. Even more impressively, 20 billion of those were in 2012 and 2 billion of those were in December alone.
Apple also revealed it has over 500,000,000 active iTunes accounts (that is, with active credit cards) and that app developers have now made $7 billion in revenue (not counting Apple’s 30% cut).
Welcome to 2013. The year everything continued to change.