I hereby call for the introduction of a Sense of Perspective Server: an impossible, persistent Minecraft world in which we all gather once a month just to hammer home precisely how many people are playing, have played and have serious plans to play Notch’s albatross.
Why? Because 12 million is a number so large as to be utterly meaningless, rolling immediately off the tongue and down the back of your brain, never to be seen again. Mojang might as well replace the counter on their stats page with a box that reads: “301+”.
In lieu of the server, let’s find a couple of half-decent points of comparison.
A time of writing, 12,005,753 people have bought the game on PC, Mac or Linux. Of those, 13,674 were bought In the last 24 hours.
That means that Mojang have now shifted as many invisible copies of Minecraft on PC as Blizzard did Diablo 3 last year. That more hard drives are home to Minecraft than shelves, attics and car boot sales are to Super Mario 64, Super Smash Bros. Brawl or Halo 3.
And perhaps most astoundingly, that Minecraft’s now less than 15,000 sales away from matching Black Ops’ PS3 player base. You know – Call of Duty: Black Ops.
“yay Notch on Twitter. Any further thoughts to add?