Minecraft Celebrates 16 Million Sales on PC with New Snapshot 14w28b

Coders Rest In The Office Of Swedish Company Mojang In Stockholm — Coders rest in the Mojang company office in Stockholm January 21, 2013. A pool table, a pinball machine, board games and Lego dot the offices of Mojang, the small Swedish company behind the wildly popular Minecraft video game, and one of its founders is wearing a tuxedo and purple tie on a recent "formal Friday". The atmosphere reflects the independent spirit that has contributed to the raw identity of the game that has just sold 20 million copies. The founders want to keep it that way. Mojang, the Swedish word for gadget, has so far resisted selling to a bigger player or listing on the stock market even though that could mean monster payoffs for the 25-person staff and funding to expand dramatically its games. Picture taken January 21, 2013. Reuters/Ints Kalnins

As the release date for the "Minecraft PS4 Edition" and "Minecraft Xbox One Edition" come closer, "Minecraft" retains its popularity among fans, long-time players and even newbies as the franchise hits its 16 million mark for the PC and Mac versions of the game.

Mojang has displayed the sales counter, which does not even count those who are playing "Minecraft" on their consoles and mobile phones. The "Minecraft" fever is only about to get higher, considering that even the mobile edition of the game, "Minecraft: Pocket Edition" has recently received the 0.9.0 update which will bring bigger worlds and more features to your pocket Minecraft-ing.

GameSpot reports that, of the current numbers seen for the PC and Mac versions of "Minecraft," two million of these have been sold in as little as five months, because the last sales announcement of the game was 14 million back in February, which was less than a year ago.

Minecraft Snapshot 14w28b Released

Speaking of improvements to "Minecraft," the latest snapshot 14w28b has recently been released by developer Mojang.

"We're starting to enter the last phase of our development cycle for 1.8, and so we'll be focusing on finalizing features, fixing bugs and optimizing the game over the next few weeks as we draw a little closer to something we'd like to eventually consider releasable," said Mojang via its official Web site.

"Today's snapshot is one such example, bringing (hopefully) some big optimizations to the server and client, a few less bugs to worry about, and a handful of hugs in their place."

Mojang has also listed down some of the changes that will be coming with this pre-Minecraft 1.8 snapshot as enumerated below:

- Servers can now customise network compression in server.properties

- The new block model format for resource packs can be considered stable and ready to use.

- Enchantments and effects now accept names instead of arbitrary IDs.

- Alternative (random) block models specified by resource packs can now be disabled in Video Settings.

- Many optimisations to both the server (including singleplayer) and the client.

- Less bugs!

- Compressed space and time.

That's not all as a long list of bugs has been posted on the Mojang Web site. The link above contains the detailed bug fixes and optimisations that can be expected with the latest snapshot.