Minecraft still bigger than Fortnite as Microsoft rules out Minecraft 2


Minecraft is still number one

As massive as Fortnite may be at the moment, it’s still dwarfed by Minecraft – according to the latest figures from Microsoft.

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Microsoft has insisted that there are no plans for a Minecraft 2 any time soon, for the simple reason that the original game is still the most popular video game in the world.

‘I really don’t think that makes sense for Minecraft, given the community’, Microsoft boss Helen Chiang told Business Insider. ‘It’s something that always fractures the community.’

According to Microsoft the game has more than 91 million monthly active users, compared to 78.3 million for Fortnite.

‘I don’t think there’s really a need for Minecraft 2’, Mojang’s Jens Bergentsen added. ‘You would be able to create a Minecraft 2 game in Minecraft’.

Instead, Microsoft’s approach is to make more spin-offs, with Diablo style dungeon crawler Minecraft: Dungeons having been unveiled over the weekend.

Telltale Games’ Minecraft: Story Mode has also proven popular, although the future of that series is now in doubt, despite work on an interactive version for Netflix still continuing.

‘The way that we’ve decided to expand – and I think Dungeons is the first example of that – is a way that we’re trying to keep our community together,’ said Chiang.

‘That’s why our updates our free. We don’t want to ask [players] to move from Minecraft 1 to Minecraft 2. We want them to just enjoy Minecraft. And there’s other ways that we can expand that are more meaningful and authentic to what we want to be, rather than just releasing another iteration in the way that most other franchises do.’

Microsoft paid $2.5 billion for Minecraft back in 2014, and although at the time there were concerns that interest in the game had already peaked audiences have only increased since then.

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