User blog comment:Jeremiah Garland/POTCO vs. Minecraft?/@comment-3112181-20121212190137

Just some hard facts for you:

Exactly 8,296,638 people have bought Minecraft. And that's just the number of people who have bought it; the number of registered users (total number of people who have bought the game and those who are subscribed) is estimated to be roughly 16,000,000 - 17,000,000 people.

The number of subscribed users to POTCO (that is, accounts with Unlimited Access) is approximately 693,721. The number of subscribed POTCO players overall (that is, combined Unlimited Access users and Basic Access users) is a little more than 1,000,000.

After doing the math, there are approximately 12 times more paying members for Minecraft than there are paying members for POTCO. Overall, there are about 16 to 17 times more Minecraft players than POTCO players.

That being said, think about it this way: for every one POTCO player, there is about 12 Minecraft players. Roughly, there is an astonishing 1,195% increase in Minecraft users to POTCO users.

And as John said below, POTCO has been operating since October 2007: about five years and two months. In that time, they've mustered 693,721 paying users, an average of about 134,442 new users per year.

Minecraft, on the other hand, has been up since May, 2009: about three years and seven months. In that time, 8,296,638 paying members have joined Minecraft, which means they gain on average 2,315,556 new users per year.

Here's some more food for thought: POTCO was developed obviously by Disney, one of America's (and the world's) largest franchise and media tycoons. An estimated $10 - $12 million was invested into making and maintaining the game back in 2007. Today, they make about $400,000 per year based on subscription costs.

On the other hand, Minecraft was developed solely by a little-known computer programmer in Sweden, named Markus Persson, making it an "indie" (independent) genre game. Less than $100,000 was invested into making the game. Upon initial release, Minecraft even went without a publishing company, and lacked the funds to produce advertisement. It spread, however, entirely through word of mouth. As of November 2012, the Minecraft franchise, since backed by the publishing company "Majong" (also founded by Persson) is making an estimated revenue of $80,000,000 per year. (exactly 200 times more than the POTCO franchise makes).

In the last 24 hours, 5,872 people have bought Minecraft.

Furthermore, POTCO is only available to users in the United States, United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada, and parts of Mexico and Latin America. Minecraft, on the other hand, operates in 105 different countries.

Now on to some ratings.

For POTCO:

GameRankings Magazine scored POTCO 72%

Metacritic Reviews scored it 60%

Game Revolution gave the game a grade of C+

GameZone gave it a score of 7/10

X-Play Video Games gave it two stars out of five

Now, on to Minecraft:

GameRankings Magazine scored Minecraft 92.79%

Metacritic Reviews scored it 93%

1UP Games gave the game a grade of A+

Eurogamer scored the game 10/10

IGN scored it 9/10

GameSpy gave Minecraft a flawless five stars our of five

Still think POTCO is better?

Here's the link: https://minecraft.net ;)