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 owners more control over their "Minecraft" environments. With the release of the alpha version, the first client-side mods began to appear; these added relatively simple things, like other textures or amendments to the in-game compass. Towards the end of 2010, new mods were released which featured more content than previous ones. "Minecraft" was now preparing to move into its beta development phase, and popular mods such as "IndustrialCraft", "Railcraft" and "BuildCraft" were first released to the public. As opposed to their predecessors, these mods had the potential to change the entire game instead of simply tweaking minor aspects of it.