The indie hit Minecraft, a rude, 3D puzzle/world building game, has surpassed 500,000 copies in sales, netting the single developer, Swedish Markus Perrson, some cool $5 million. But that’s not the surprising fact, the surprising fact is that the game is still in Alpha, and has sold that many copies, in addition to being played by some 1.6 million players — 500k of which have paid for the game. Perrson has now started a real game studio with all that money, and has hired several developers to work with him.

With the release of Kinect, Microsoft has firmly entered the motion controller game. As you remember, Kinect came of a startup they acquired a few years ago, and now Microsoft has acquired another motion sensing company, Casesta, which develops hardware for tracking motion in a 3D world. Canesta’s tech isn’t used in Kinect, so Microsoft will likely use it to improve Kinect, or perhaps use it in the next Xbox consoles, rumored to be released in 2012.

Danish developer IO Interactive, developers of Hitman and Kane & Lynch, have had a second round of laid offs this year, this time, 30 employees were let go. Earlier this year, IO laid off 20, which now brings the total workforce to 160 staffers. According to rumors, the lay offs were a result of a canceled Microsoft project, but IO wouldn’t comment on that, as they’re now owned by Square Enix.