Minecraft has received generally favorable responses from critics, and has had notably large numbers of sales. On January 12, 2011, Minecraft passed 1,000,000 purchases, less than a month after reaching Beta. At the same time, the game had no publisher backing and has never been commercially advertised except through word of mouth. As of February 8, 2011, Minecraft had over 4,000,000 registered users, and over 1,230,000 purchases. In September 2010, after an impromptu "free to play" weekend, the game had a spike in sales of over 25,000 purchases in 24 hours. The game has been praised for the creative freedom it grants its players in-game, and for how dynamic its overall gameplay is. PC Gamer listed Minecraft as the fourth-best game to play at work. A review of the alpha version, by Scott Munro of the Daily Record, called it "already something special" and urged readers to buy it. Jim Rossignol of Rock, Paper, Shotgun also recommended the alpha of the game, calling it "a kind of generative 8-bit Lego Stalker". On September 17, 2010, gaming webcomic Penny Arcade began a series of comics and news posts about the addictiveness of the game. Video game talk show Good Game gave it a 7.5 and 9 out of 10, praising its creativity and customization, though they criticized its lack of a tutorial.

My youngest son plays this a lot. I find the intersection between the primitiveness of the graphics, simplicity of gameplay, motivation and creativity both interesting and attractive (though I've never played it myself). Basically, the game revolves around construction, using simple building blocks - yes... literally 'blocks'. Notionally this is done in order to protect yourself from monsters but in practice I think that construction is often undertaken for its own sake. As with Second Life, and other virtual world type activities, there is also a machinima aspect to the game, with people sharing videos of their constructions on YouTube. At a recent Bathcamp, one of the speakers noted a YouTube video showing someone's Minecraft-based recreation of a Mayan temple :-)

I also think that the ground-up success story is quite inspiring.

In terms of technology, the game is now hosted on Amazon Web Services (which is how I stumbled across the Wikipedia page this morning).

"Fourth best game to play at work"! Now there's an odd award?