The incredible indie sensation Minecraft has sold over 1.3 million copies since it was first released halfway through last year, and it’s still only in beta. Expect the amount of copies sold to quickly grow as high as one of Minecraft‘s physics-defying, voxel-based fantasy structures in 2011, though, because dev Mojang has just announced that Minecraft will be coming to iOS in 2011.
This isn’t the first time that Minecraft hit iOS: back in November, it briefly hit the App Store by way of a free, unauthorized port, then was just as quickly pulled. Mojang seems to have noticed the popularity of the port, though, because they’ve just added a new member to their team whose job is to port it over to Apple’s line of iOS devices.
According to Mojang, Minecraft for iOS will receive features that “make sense” for the touchscreen platform. Whether Mojang is envisioning a conventional port with integrated touchscreen controls or a unique tree fork of Minecraft with features specific to touchscreen devices is unknown.
It’ll be interesting to see how Minecraft develops on the App Store. Minecraft for the Mac is known for a hectic update schedule that adds radical new — and sometimes, insufficiently tested — features to the executable on a weekly basis. Mojang will have to slow things down to get things through the App Store review process, but as Minecraft exits beta and becomes increasingly feature complete, that may very well not be an option.
