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 in five weeks. The release of the game's PlayStation Vita version boosted "Minecraft" sales by 79%, outselling both PS3 and PS4 debut releases and becoming the largest "Minecraft" launch on a PlayStation console. The PS Vita version sold 100,000 digital copies in Japan within the first two months of release, according to an announcement by SCE Japan Asia. By January 2015, 500,000 digital copies of "Minecraft" were sold in Japan across all PlayStation platforms, with a surge in primary school children purchasing the PS Vita version. "Minecraft" helped improve Microsoft's total first-party revenue by $63 million for the 2015 second