While Animal Crossing: New Horizons might be the hottest video game of the pandemic, Minecraft is hitting some significant milestones as well.
Sales of the 11-year old game have topped 200 million copies, Microsoft said Monday in a blog post. Even more impressive, 126 million people are currently playing Minecraft each month. The news comes as part of the game’s birthday celebration on May 17.
Minecraft is even more popular on YouTube. In 2019, it was the most viewed game on the streaming site, Microsoft says. And that popularity is likely to see another spike later this month as Minecraft Dungeons is released on May 26. A free Nether update is coming to the base game this summer as well.
Microsoft has leaned in on Minecraft as people have been locked in their homes due to stay-at-home orders. As the coronavirus pandemic began to spread, the company made the Minecraft: Education Edition free to educators to help students stay engaged. It also launched the Minecraft Education Collection in the main game, incorporating content from some of the most popular Marketplace partners. Both services will remain free through the end of June.
Since March 24, there have been more than 50 million downloads of the free educational content.
Minecraft has also partnered with the United Nations Development Programme to share the World Health Organization’s coronavirus prevention guidance.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.