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 as Java is known to be. However, Mojang developer Tommaso Checchi reassured fans on Reddit that modding was "too important" to "Minecraft" for the Java-based versions to be discontinued. Mojang released version 1.9 of "Minecraft" for the PC in early 2016, and with this update the company promised that the creation and updating of mods would be significantly simplified. Previous updates have been known to break available mods, forcing creators to spend considerable time updating them. In April 2017, Mojang announced the upcoming creation of a so-called "Minecraft Marketplace", where players would be able to sell user-created content for the