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 "",
Early access this model is "Minecraft". The game's development began in 2009 by Markus Persson initially for internet browsers that he developed alongside his full-time job. The alpha-version game proved popular enough that within the month of release, Persson added a means by which players could pay 10 euros (approximately 15) to access the game, allowing him to continue its development. As sales of the game increased, he was able to quit his job about eight months later to work on the game full-time, founding Mojang to bring on a larger development team. "Minecraft" continued to offer early access throughout its development