Minecraft Has Many Millions More Monthly Players Than Fortnite; No Sequel Is Coming

When Microsoft paid $2.5 billion to buy the Minecraft franchise, some predicted that the company's next move would be to announce more games, including Minecraft 2. A sequel to Minecraft may never happen--and for good reason, according to Minecraft's top boss.

"I really don't think that makes sense for Minecraft, given the community," Microsoft's Minecraft boss Helen Chiang told Business Insider. "It's something that always fractures the community."

According to the site, Minecraft currently has more than 91 million monthly active players, which is well ahead of Fortnite's 78.3 million players from August. If Microsoft were to make Minecraft 2, the player base might get fractured as some move to the sequel and others stay with the original. While Microsoft could theoretically do that and still make a lot of money, it makes more sense to keep the community together, according to Chiang.

"We're trying to keep our community together," she explained. "That's why our updates our free. We don't want to ask [players] to move from Minecraft 1 to Minecraft 2. We want them to just enjoy Minecraft. And there's other ways that we can expand that are more meaningful and authentic to what we want to be, rather than just releasing another iteration in the way that most other franchises do."

Xbox boss Phil Spencer said in 2014, after Microsoft bought Minecraft, that Minecraft 2 doesn't make a lot of sense.

Of course, Microsoft is expanding the Minecraft franchise, just not with a sequel. Just this weekend, Microsoft announced a Diablo-style dungeon-crawler called Minecraft Dungeons. The game, which launches in 2019 for PC, does not include the franchise's trademark building and creating mechanic.