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Microsoft more than made their money back on Minecraft

Minecraft was an absolute steal, theyve almost certainly made back their money. The rest of your statement is pretty agreeable, but MC is booming and will continue to be a fixture of gaming for at least 5+ more years imo. Despite all the clones theres still no successor on the horizon.

The user base of Minecraft has skyrocketed to 126M monthly active players (https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/05/18/minecraft-connecting-...) so no, absolutely not.

200 million copies of Minecraft sold to date, with 126 million active players each month? That seems almost impossible. It seems like that would mean that even most of the people who bought the game years ago are still playing every month.

One explanation: Nostalgic value in 5+ years.