Notch waxes trivial with the latest stat update to his Minecraft empire.
20 million is not a small number. 8 million people live within the limits of New York City. World of Warcraft had 12.5 million concurrent users at its peak. As of this weekend, Minecraft has more registered users than both of those combined. Of course, not all of those are paying customers with Markus “Notch” Persson reporting that only about 4.6 million people have paid for a copy. Still, 20 million registered users for an independently developed building game from Sweden is nothing to sneeze at.
After Notch announced the milestone on Twitter, he decided to go a little crazy with his comparisons. “Minecraft now has 20 million registered users. At 70 kg each, that’s 25% of the weight of the Great Pyramid of Giza,” he said on Saturday.
“20 million people produce enough heat energy to power a Flux Capacitor, but there are significant logistic problems with doing so,” Notch added.
“At 4 liters per day, it would take a million years to drink 20 million liquidized humans,” he continued. “Okay, I’ll stop now.”
Perhaps the most important nugget of information to be gleaned is a simple percentage. “23.23 percent also bought the game. Extrapolating, we find that 76.77 percent of the internet will register for things they don’t want,” said Notch.
Wise words. Given the number of forums and websites I’ve signed up for with no intention of handing over any money, that ratio might actually be much, much higher.
