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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Self-Publishing   >   Marketing   >   Social proof – the Minecraft way to €120,000 of sales in a single day

Social proof – the Minecraft way to €120,000 of sales in a single day

By on September 29, 2010

Minecraft is going crazy.

In the last 24 hours, there were 31,616 registrations, and 11,887 sales.

That’s a staggering 37.5% conversion rate and, at €9.95 per copy, revenue of €118,275.

In a single day.

This page is an amazing demonstration of social proof in action. It shows you how many people are buying it, how many people have bought in the last 24 hours and it gives, as a result, a pretty unsubtle hint that if you want to be in with the in-crowd, you need to buy it – because everyone else is.

I’m not saying that this page is the reason for Minecraft’s success. There is much more to it than that (and Mode 7 Games’ piece on What Indie Developers Can Learn from Minecraft is a great analysis).

But social proof is incredibly important (a topic I will come back to soon). This page is social proof, but so is the way in which everyone is talking about it, twittering about it, sharing YouTube videos about it…

Social proof is a very powerful thing. If everyone else is doing it, it must be good, right.

Off to buy my copy now… after all, you can make rollercoasters in it.

See you in a few weeks.

About Nicholas Lovell

As well as founding Gamesbrief, Nicholas is a consultant to the games industry on online and corporate strategy and financial matters. He can be contacted at nicholas@gamesbrief.com Following a decade long financial career in the City of London, Nicholas founded Lodestar Partners, a corporate finance boutique that focused exclusively on the games industry. From 2006 to 2008, Nicholas was CEO of GameShadow, a games website and patching engine. He is a non-executive director of developer nDreams and provides consultancy services to a number of companies including Firefly and Huddle.
  • John

    Just to focus on the statistics page itself here – I’d say it has practically no bearing on the sales or awareness people have of them game. But of course outside of this the word of mouth doing the rounds now is completely validating this as a “must buy, is fun” purchase. I do think that Quinns reports on RockPaperShotgun.com were the release which converted all that potential energy damned up into flood in full flow.