To put it bluntly, Minecraft doesn't need to go free-to-play, given its success as a premium product. It's not like there are no other revenue streams available after the initial buy-in, either, as Minecraft has skins, texture packs, and other add-ons that players can buy to enrich the experience further.

Yeah, it doesn't really work with the way we built it," explained Ingela Garneij, executive producer of Minecraft Vanilla. “I mean we built the game for a different purpose.