Minecraft hits 74 million monthly active players

Former Minecraft business head Matt Booty was recently promoted to corporate vice president of Microsoft Studios, leaving his old position open. Now his previous role has been taken up by Helen Chiang, who served as Booty’s operations head. In an interview with PopSugar, Chiang revealed Minecraft’s outstanding active player numbers (via Windows Central).

“We just recently set a new record in December for monthly active users, so now we’re at 74 million monthly active users — and that’s really a testament to people coming back to the game, whether it’s through the game updates or bringing in new players from across the world,” Chiang told PopSugar over the phone. “That’s really our goal, to keep building the community that we have.”

Not only is the franchise’s active monthly user base on course to reach a staggering milestone of 100 million, the game has sold over 144 million copies across a dozen different platforms.

To keep the momentum going, Chiang hopes to make Minecraft more accessible to every person around the world. She said, “All of our players are playing across a number of different devices and platforms, and it shouldn’t matter where they’re playing — what’s important to us is that they have the opportunity to play it together, because it makes it so much more of a rich experience. That’s the journey we’re still on . . . we’ve been doing a lot of work to expand into new geographies and really just making Minecraft available to anybody, anywhere in the world, any way that they want to play.”

Chiang also spoke about how the company continues to provide frequent updates on all platforms to keep players coming back for more.