Minecraft accolades. Social media, parodies, adaptations, merchandise, and the MineCon convention played large roles in popularizing the game. It has also been used in educational environments ("Minecraft Education Edition"), especially in the realm of computing systems, as virtual computers and hardware devices have been built in it. By late 2018, over 154 million copies had been sold across all platforms, making it the second best-selling video game of all time, behind "Tetris". In September 2014, Microsoft announced a deal to buy Mojang and the "Minecraft" intellectual property for , with the acquisition completed two months later. Spin-off games, such as "",
Minecraft mods time. Mojang stepped in to save the project. Another controversy came about in March 2017, when Slovakian cybercompany ESET revealed that 87 examples of trojan horses were distributed through the Google Play Store under the guise of "Minecraft" mods. Their purpose was to either aggressively display ads or con players into downloading other apps. Combined, these fake mods gathered over one million downloads in the first three months of 2017. The total number of Minecraft mods is officially very hard to calculate because of the sheer number of them, both old and new ones, but one of the repository websites,