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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

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com