Minecraft Takes off

Via bigdownloads:

Minecraft. The sandbox indie game has been the talk of the game industry for the past few months and it continues to sell well over 10,000 copies per day. Not bad for a title that's officially just in an "alpha" stage of development and was originally made by one person.

Today the game's official stats page has revealed that Minecraft has now sold over 300,000 units since it was first released over a year ago. If sales continue at the game's current pace, Minecraft will reach the 500,000 unit mark before the end of October and sell 1 million copies before the end of the year.

Good for them. Nice to see an indie developer take off

Problems getting the word out

When people talk about the supposed "death of PC gaming", one of the main issues that comes up is the focus in the industry with hyping up big name, flashy games with advanced graphics that either sell big or fall flat, often times taking the company with it. Unfortunately, many gaming news sites help this process along buy not devoting any time to smaller or independent games to help them gain any attention. This seems to create an endless cycle where big publishers get all the press, most of it seemingly related to expansion packs for the same franchise.

Gamespot.com is probably the best example of this, though certainly not the only one. Anyway there are other sites that give a little more even coverage, and one of my favorites at the moment is Big Downloads, which not only gives a little more fair coverage but also offers trial downloads of several games, new and old. If your bored, take a look.