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 apparently taking full ownership of the CraftBukkit modification, although the validity of this claim was questioned due to its status as an open-source project with many contributors, licensed under the GNU General Public License and Lesser General Public License. On 15 September 2014, Microsoft announced a $2.5 billion deal to buy Mojang, along with the ownership of the "Minecraft" intellectual property. The deal was suggested by Persson when he posted a tweet asking a corporation to buy his share of the game after receiving criticism for "trying to do the right thing". It was completed on 6 November 2014, and