Minecraft might be approaching it seventh birthday, but the evergreen game is proving that age really is just number.
As reported by Business Insider, Mojang’s blocky builder currently boasts around 91 million monthly active users, having sold over 150 million copies worldwide. That means it’s more popular than Fortnite, which could only muster about 80 million active players in August.
Minecraft’s enduring popularity is one of the reasons Microsoft — which purchased developer Mojang (along with the franchise) for $2.5 billion back in 2014 — isn’t considering a direct sequel.
“I really don’t think [a sequel] makes sense for Minecraft, given the community,” said Helen Chiang, head of Minecraft at Microsoft. “It’s something that always fractures the community.”
Instead, the company has diversified the franchise in other ways, turning it into an episodic adventure called Minecraft: Story Mode with the help of the now defunct Telltale Games, before looking towards dungeon crawlers with its upcoming project Minecraft: Dungeons.
Microsoft hopes that by pushing into other genres, it’ll manage to keep the franchise relevant by providing new experiences without fragmenting its core player base.
“The way that we’ve decided to expand — and I think Dungeons is the first example of that — is a way that we’re trying to keep our community together,” added Chiang.
“That’s why our updates our free. We don’t want to ask [players] to move from Minecraft 1 to Minecraft 2. We want them to just enjoy Minecraft. And there’s other ways that we can expand that are more meaningful and authentic to what we want to be, rather than just releasing another iteration in the way that most other franchises do.”