Here’s How Many People Play ‘Minecraft’ in 2024 (User & Growth Stats)

Minecraft has been around for quite some time, specifically since 2009. That’s 14 years in the making, and although it may not seem like a lot, since the average shelf life for a game is two years, that’s a long time. You would think that the player base would have migrated by now, but in recent years, Minecraft’s popularity has grown back to its old fame, but how many people will play Minecraft in 2024?

Editor’s Note: This article is regularly updated to provide you with the latest relevant numbers regarding Minecraft’s players.

Background history

Minecraft was a one-day project by Markus Persson, developed in 2009. Back then, it was being sold for $13, and after only a year of development, Notch made his first million in sales. You couldn’t do much in the game back then, but the players were interested in learning how to play it. Markus saw this as an opportunity, created the company Mojang, and continued development with his two colleagues.

Minecraft was officially released on November 11th, 2011, at the Minecon convention. A few years later, Microsoft bought Markus’ rights to the game and took over. In 2011, Bedrock was released and was in its alpha stage of development until 2016. Nowadays, you can play Minecraft on practically any platform imaginable, so you gain easy access to the game, no matter your device of choice.

Player stats by country

With that big of a player base, you would think that almost every country in the world plays Minecraft, but most of its player base is in the US. The US takes up a little over a fifth of the player base with a percentage of 21.2%. Brazil, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Germany are the countries that follow with the highest numbers.

Conclusion

The US is a clear winner in this category, having a player percentage equal to the percentage of all the other countries on the list combined. Logically, the US also has the highest number of servers: 3748. Interestingly, the UK is the 2nd leading country in server numbers, with 2137 servers. This is likely because Brazil has a lot of mobile phone users.

Yearly player stats

There’s no data to show how many people played Minecraft every year. Besides, it would have to be an average which would make the calculation slightly incorrect. Furthermore, You have to account for each unique user, not those returning to Minecraft every month. With such a large number of users, it would take a long time to figure out the number of unique players.

Loss/Growth

From 2016 to 2019, we saw a slow-growing user trend; from 2019 to 2020, the number of users increased by a whopping 40 million. Almost equal the number of users who quit the game in 2021, with 38 million users dropping the game. The game has somewhat once again lost in popularity in 2022.

Conclusion

2021 and 2020 were the most successful years for Minecraft in terms of monthly active users. It might be that Covid-19 helped get Minecraft back on its feet, with people staying home and enjoying Minecraft and Minecraft-related content. Let’s compare the data with the number of copies sold to see the true success of Minecraft over the years.

Minecraft demographics

Gender & age

There are more male players in Minecraft than female ones. The average Minecraft player is a 24-year-old male. What’s surprising is that most of the player base is children. According to theconversation.com, Minecraft appeals to children as young as three years old, and within the age range of 3-12, 54% of players are male, while 46% are female. If you narrow the age range to 6-8, the gender gap increases as only 32% of girls play the game.

Sales by Edition

Although there is no precise data on how many sales each Edition made, Minecraft often celebrates its achievements, like Java Edition reaching 30 million cumulative sales in 2019. In 2015, Java reached 20 million cumulative sales, while Pocket Edition has sold over 133 million copies since its launch in 2012.

Counting all of the editions and versions, Minecraft has sold over 238 million copies, meaning that Pocket Edition is by far the leading edition of copies sold. It has sold more than 50% off all Minecraft copies.

What happened in 2019?

2019 was the year of Covid-19 lockdowns. Schools were closed, people transitioned to remote work, and it would seem that the whole world found refuge in the vast world of the Internet. People were socializing through games including Minecraft. Minecraft’s greatest saving grace was the amount of Minecraft-related content released on YouTube.

In 2019, Minecraft was the top game by the number of views on YouTube, with a total of 100.2 billion views. You would think that it couldn’t go any higher than that, but in 2020, Minecraft was the most-watched topic on YouTube, with a total of 201 billion views. In 2021, the cumulative number of views reached 1 trillion views.

A little fun fact is that the most watched Minecraft-related YouTube video is by content creator Dream, with over 116 million views as of the day of writing this article.

Loss/growth stats in 2024

7 out of 11 months in 2023, we can see a clear rise in monthly user numbers. However when you look at the percentages, the numbers don’t seem so bad after all. The monthly growth is likely connected to players that already played the game and have returned. The biggest loss was in June 2023, whereas the biggest gain was in April.

Minecraft is counting losses in terms of its player base in the four months after June, even though these losses are minuscule due to the gain in January of 2024. However just last month, Minecraft has seen an incredible downward trend when it comes to the number of players.

When can we expect to see the fall of Minecraft?

It’s hard to tell where Minecraft will be in a couple of years, but it’s doing well, and it will be hard to dethrone its success. Even if we saw nothing but losses in the number of active monthly users, it would take a lot of time before the game was considered dead.

Overall, user numbers are declining, but the number is insignificant to how many devoted and active players Minecraft still has. Their strong suit is that you can always change the game with mods and different custom maps, continuously making the game interesting.

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