...it is honestly an apple vs. oranges comparison.

Minecraft is a 10...or 15€ (mostly) download title on various platforms vs. full priced software on fewer platforms and bundled software.

It is still a smashing success though..

Edit: And as ktay said, the rules the author set are pretty arbitrairy tbh, they likely included the sales of the smartphone port in those 42  million.

...this opens the can of worms that Angry Birds could count too, it had console ports and retail releases too.

umm what??

That game was bundled to oblivion... "it isn't worth mentioning"

OT: And deservedly so. Minecraft is one of the best games of the last decade simply because it promotes creativity and logical thinking the way it does. There is no better game for kids out there, not even Nintendos franchises can compete with it in that regard.

Oops :P
Fixed

BTW Tetris also craps all over those numbers as do many smartphone games

no its not =P

edit: or maybe it is =(

huehuehhehehue

Minecraft was a real game changer. Deserves the sales.

A truly shitty game.
COD is more deserving of its sales than Minecraft.

As does World of WarCraft.
World of WarCraft is monolithic, we know that at-least 14 million copies were sold, digital sales isn't tracked which as you know on the PC... Have stupidly long legs.
I recall blizzard stating several years ago when they had around 12 million players, that more people had quit than were playing the game, which is some food for thought.
Plus, there are 100 million accounts and over 500 million characters now, thanks to the "free to level 20" cap thingy that they introduced.

Also interested to know some updated Half Life 2 numbers, the game seems to have a high attachment rate on Steam, And with Steam's rapid growth just over the past couple of years, it would be nice to get some updated numbers on it.
Currently (This is in no way representative) but roughly 1/3rd of my friends list on steam has Half Life 2 and Steam has 75+ million active users now.
Time to nag Valve/Steam on twitter I think.

Anyway, Minecraft deserves the sales, I've sunk a few thousand hours into the game over the years, starting whilst it was in Alpha before you even had "monsters" or could even smelt things and maps were finite in size, hope the success doesn't end here and Mojang releases the game on more platforms like Ouya, Windows Phone, Windows RT etc' etc'.