Minecraft annual revenue reportedly makes around $100 million, according to an entry on the Redmond-based tech giant employee’s LinkedIn page.
Jeff Y., who then served as game developer before being promoted to senior leadership a year after, reported the figure and said that he helped to develop key features for the game and solve many bugs, which led to increased engagement, quality, and maintaining usability (Shoutout to @bpgprad222 on X for the findings)
Playing Minecraft splitscreen on the Steam Deck is possible now, thanks to this script that automates everything for you.
Generative AI is a controversial topic, and Microsoft seems to have found that Minecraft is the perfect Trojan Horse to get children on board.
AI is an amazing tool and you’re absolutely right, just like they’re caring less about physical media since they’re growing up in a digital world. Only us old-ass curmudgeon‘s cry about this stuff.
I personally, support AI 100%. As a creative outlet it’s literally a tool to help with creativity or shortcomings a user might have but dreams about doing things. Like those AI generated movie trailers on YouTube are awesome. Imagine being able to make games you’ve dreamt of and using AI to make it a reality.
Lot of great applications and I embrace it, regardless of having watched Terminator 2 a bajillion times, lol.
The only ones who "support AI 100%" are those too lazy or too inept to do the job themselves.
The AI-generated videos on YouTube are absolute unsightly slop. They're all the same, like pretty much everything AI makes and will always make.
If you "dream about doing things"... do things. Put effort into learning instead of having a bot do it for you so that you aren't actually doing the things and are just taking credit (from something born of the theft of other people's work), trucking yourself into believing that you have created something when you have, indeed, created nothing.
AI is the anti creative outlet humans put heart and soul into their work and errors are a part of the art just as much as ideas are.
Offloading creative things to a gen AI is enforcing the fact that your idea wasn't strong enough to stand on its own.
"... are those too lazy or too inept to do the job themselves"
Cool, yeah, you definitely know what you're talking about.
This isn't two years ago when it was new. I've been a software developer for 13 years and the code Gemini and GPT writes is actually usable, when you know how to query in the right context.
And why would I learn it? Oh yeah, because heads of companies and new opportunities in the future will 100% require knowledge of AI, and in 5 years, my near 20 years of experience would just be reduced to if I can meet the inevitable "5+ years AI tooling" requirements or not. Nothing I or anyone can do about that. Being lazy or inept is refusing to adapt to or flat out rejecting changes in the environment.
CrimsonWing, 100% right here.
I don't support it more than I try to understand it.
Terminator 2 was worse than 1 and it let to the host of tasteless Marvel Movies and New Star Wars Movies we have today.
@abriel Carmack recently commented about this too. It's not being lazy it's progression.
Think about when the wheel was invented. How that made people "lazy" not having to carry stuff manually. AI is a tool and should be 100% human monitored/controlled. It's when you decide to let it do ALL the work, you become lazy.
@bunt-custardly: Carmack is a tech chud and an executive. He couldn't care less about whether normal rank-and-file developers would lose their jobs to this slop as long as his company could save money on their salaries.
And yes, it's lazy slop.
"Because Carmack says so" is not a great argument.
Incidentally, what Carmack specifically defended is the Quake experiment, which is *literally* letting the AI do all the work, so there goes your argument.
@Tacoboto:
If you let a bot do your job you're either lazy or inept. You pick. I can't care less of how much alleged "experience" you say you have.
If you use ChatGPT or Gemini you're literally stealing other people's work because that's where the code they give you comes from. AI creates nothing.
I've heard "Nothing I or anyone can do about that" about NFTs, crypto, and all that crap. Nothing is inevitable.
Not using and crying fowl about AI in 2025 is like someone in 2005 saying that using Intellisense and code completion in Visual Studio is lazy and inept.
You know nothing, Abriael, and you speak out of ignorance rather than experience.
"you're literally stealing other people's work"
Ever hear of "open source"? Probably not, because with that statement you clearly know absolutely nothing.
@Tacoboto:
You just demonstrated that you're just a troll and not a developer of any kind. A developer would know that the data used to train the AI chatbots you mentioned is not and has never been open source.
You're likely just an xbox fanboy trying to defend Microsoft just because it's Microsoft. Pathetic.
LOL, so wrong again! I refuse to use MS Copilot in any meaningful regard still. Gemini provides the most detailed results (with context as well) and GPT I feel has started to lag behind it.
Copilot has routinely broken after a few queries for me and the UI Microsoft built is embarrassingly underfeatured. Again, you speak with ignorance over something that you do not understand.
@Tacoboto: sure mate, keep pretending. Like any actual developer would slip on the open source discourse. Totally not a Microsoft fanboy with Master Chief in the icon. 👀
It's so open-source that AI companies are being sued into oblivion by the many they have stolen from. And when these lawsuits end with them being found guilty, this fad will hit the brakes big time.
All I'll say is you should not speak against that which you have no knowledge of or experience in.
And I'll tell you that once you're an adult, with a big boy job, you're expected to get things done, and you should work smarter, not harder. If there is a tool out there that can make a 3 hour job a 3 minute job, you use that tool. That makes you competitive, that makes you more productive. It keeps you relevant in an evolving industry.
We'll see where the "work smarter" goes when the lawsuits cripple this AI slop and everything needs to be retrained on non-stolen content, assuming it's even possible 😂
@Tacoboto nit sure how you're getting usable code from Gemini and gpt I spend more time fixing the code it outputs personally though Claude AI is far superior for generating it from my experience at least.
And honestly I'll go to Claude to write the bones of what I'm after nothing's perfect still a ton of rationalising that goes in after
Well yeah because they’ll grow up with crap like this to make them like it
It’s like training people to defend generative AI or AI in general as they get older
Creative based AI is terrible and I feel bad for the real artists getting the shaft losing jobs to it
They will care if parents talk to them about it in a way to show them why they should care. Unfortunately there may not be enough who do that.
I understand if this tool aids children in Minecraft development. However, I believe that substituting human workers with AI and reducing the creative input of developers, artists, and other professionals is detrimental. It also results in content that lacks a certain human touch.
This has nothing to do with helping children develop in Minecraft. This just uses Minecraft to condition children into liking generative AI.
Their "curriculum" even paints intellectual property laws as something that can hinder innovation. It can't be more disgusting than this.
The idea is that AI can be implemented to aid them in their creations, specifically for minecraft; That's all I was getting at.
Everything else I mentioned was in agreement that AI isn't good and can ruin everything. Sorry you missed the entire point of what I was getting at. Boop
Its getting more and more dystopian lolz. Just wait til the robots are more commonplace, everyone will be replaced. Hey I'd be fine with it if it means everything in life will be free. Cause that's the goal right? The end of capitalism? Bettering society for the sake of bettering the world? By ending human labor? And allowing us all to live rent free and enjoy all the comforts that this amazing technology will bring? Right? Cause if we're all gonna end up jobless and homeless then wtf is the point?
Gotta start em young is the plan here…
Maybe we should relook the whole capitalism thing 😅
People think the film industry is derivative and out of ideas these days, and they're right for the most part, imagine how it would be with creativity handed over to AI. Braindead, basically. Same for gaming.
In any creative endeavour like films, gaming, art, it needs nipping in the bud and used appropriately, not being embraced.
Not everything needs to go free-to-play!
I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of money Minecraft makes these days is from DLC, so going f2p would make a lot of sense. But given how cheap the game actually is ($30 for consoles/PC and $7 on mobile) I don't think it would make that much of diference.
If 50% of all kids buy just one copy of this game (made up number but not unrealistic as the game has become almost a rites of passage) then Microsoft is doing great by being paid for each copy.
it would actually make no sense to go f2p.
If you can charge something for the basegame and people pay for it (obviously they are still doing it) then going f2p would be idiotic.
Puting a entry price on anything also reduces it potential player base and therefore its paying costumer for DLC. That mind you likely make the bulk of Minecraft revenue. That is basic business since at least a decade, so I would get in with the times.
Funny how they and their parent company have different views on subscription-based delivery.
I think $100 million would be an understatement. Minecraft Mobile alone generated around $100 million of revenue last year ( https://www.statista.com/st... The PC and console versions alone probably rake in considerable revenues too, maybe more or less than mobile.
Lol!
100 Million annual is what Minecraft has been making in revenue just on Mobile.
It´s the best selling game in history with more than 300 million copies sold across all platforms supported.
Minecraft literally prints money!
I always wrote this game off as a kids game, but I'm actually starting to get hooked in VR this summer. Something about experiencing the grand scale of everything surrounding you. I mainly got into it bc it is a way to keep in contact with my nephew, who grew up a Minecraft obsessed kid, and now 10 or so years later moved off to another country here in his 20's. It's really an experience that needs to be shared I think. I could never get into the flat version when I tried solo.
I've started experimenting w Mods and have tried the Nvidia RTX ray tracing maps, which actually made me appreciate the flat game for the first time! Truth is, I can't stand the base graphics. Even in VR I keep it modded. But I think a lot of appeal really comes from modding, the open ended possibilities.
I completely understand other adults not getting into it. I was one of them until recently, but maybe try playing w a child or niece or nephew and you may find yourself enjoying that bonding time. We just got my 6 1/2 year old daughter in on it a few weeks ago. My nephew on PC, daughter on the PS5 and myself on PC VR all playing together She's already gotten some of the crafting down. Her laughs and smiles make it worth it and make me feel like a kid again. :)
soo...profit at what? $50mil? still a long way to make back that $2bil MS paid for them.
$100M/Year revenue, not profit, is too low, no way Minecraft is doing this bad. This would make the $2.5bi purchased a terrible deal, i mean, even $200M/Year revenue would, like, configure a bad deal.