Minecraft regularly tops 1 million concurrent players, more popular than Dota 2
Minecraft concurrent player figures outpace those of any Steam game.
Newly-revealed Minecraft player statistics show just how phenomenally popular the sandbox builder is.
Mojang's Nathan Adams revealed on Twitter that the developer has recently acquired access to concurrent player stats. At time of posting, he said there were 998,000 players messing about, punching trees and building giant golden dongs.
We can probably extrapolate that Minecraft regularly hosts over 1 million concurrent players, then. That's absolutely incredible; there are very few games that can boast of that with any regularity.
Minecraft is available on a huge number of devices - PlayStation 3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One in addition to mobile, Mac and PC, so it naturally has access to a much larger user base than games on less numerous platforms, but since Steam is one of the few sources of transparent concurrent player numbers, let's make a comparison to put it into perspective.
The most popular game on Steam at time of writing is Dota 2, which peaked at 961,580 players today. Steam doesn't represent the entirety of PC gaming outside Minecraft, but Dota 2 is an absolutely byword in huge concurrent player statistics, and nothing else on the Steam list even approaches half a million, so that should give you an idea of how much sway Minecraft holds.
Minecraft was the second most searched term on YouTube last year, and YouTube is the biggest search engine after Google. No wonder Microsoft paid $2.5 billion for Minecraft.