Minecraft has yet to "officially" release, at least in its "full version," yet Mojang has sold over 1.8 million units for an estimated revenue haul of $33 million. Pretty amazing, right? With Minecraft updates coming in on the regular every few weeks and gamers still buying the game by the bucket load, when will the full version release and what needs to be added before that happens? As it turns out, not much.

Last week, the Minecraft 1.4 update released and since then, Minecraft creator Notch has opened discussed what they're working on for the 1.5 update: achievements and weather. Today, Notch updated his blog with the mots significant of updates, finally revealing the release date for the full version of Minecraft.

Minecraft will officially release on November 11, 2011 and if you're expecting drastic changes or additions to the game, don't. You'll just be disappointed. Notch made it abundantly clear that the final version of the game - it's not actually the "final" version - will remain mostly the same as to what we're playing now. They'll continue to update and tweak until then and even post-release, they'll continue on the same path of updates as well. In that sense, nothing really changes and its an argument of semantics.You say tomato, Notch says full version.

"It's a bit tricky to really do a release for Minecraft as we keep updating it all the time. For one, the version we deem as the 'full version' won’t be very different at all from what the game was like a week ago, and we’ll keep adding features after the release as well, so it’s really more of a milestone when we finally get rid of the Beta label, and some kind of goal for us to work towards. The plan is to be open with this and try to get people to cheer us on as much as possible, but to be open with the fact that the game won’t change much at the actual release day. (It’s more a progress up until that point)

We picked November 11, with the unofficial tagline 'us too'."

For gamers looking forward to what may be the busiest month of major game releases ever (ever!) this November, this Remembrance Day Minecraft release date may seem strange. Notch acknowledges that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim also comes out then, a game he's admittedly excited for, but that's not affecting the decision of the team at Mojang who held a board meeting at an Asian restaurant last night to vote on matters, including when Minecraft would finally leave the beta stage.

One thing Minecraft gamers can look forward to is increased bug support. There's been many complaints about the 1.3 update and even more so with the 1.4 update, bugs causing crashes and severely restricting the amount of players on a server due to lag. Notch had this to say about

"The most relevant parts for Minecraft is that we decided to bring in bug fixing into the development method in a more clear way so that people working customer support can add them as tasks for us..."

A polished Minecraft that would offer more server support and correct in-game bugs is something all the population of Mincraftia can appreciate and is certainly the most important of issues that needs to be address before full release.

Since we have 7 months until Minecraft officially releases, what additions do you want made to the game before then?

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Source: Notch