1) It's targeted to a really broad audience
2) It has a profitable but affordable pricetag
3) The grafics still look good and will continue to do so
4) Microsoft has three big platforms where it runs
According to Google, Minecraft made $23M up to 2011.
2011? In 2011 Minecraft was a very new product compared to where it is now. What Microsoft was purchasing there was a pre-existing virtual world software that already many kids were familiar and comfortable with. It's a world where there's no significant level of concern about inappropriate avatars, and nobody really cares. It's a world focused on construction and design, not on killing off everyone else so that you can be the last survivor. As VR gets better over the next decade, it would be entirely feasible for something based on a Minecraft like world to be a solid base for corporate and educational markets.
No, I mean expecting that a game of this type that has more than doubled in revenue for the past two years to continue to be profitable makes sense. As it turns out, this was an excellent bet, as their next quarters saw revenue increases in the hundreds of millions.
Two years later, they continued to increase sales of the game, selling about 20 million copies in 2016.
