Minecraft's influence is absolutely undeniable if you have a deal of familiarity with indie games. Games are coming out all the time based very directly off of Minecraft's block-based building system, usually marketing themselves as some kind of off-shoot niche of the Minecraft "genre" (without saying so directly, of course), and these aren't small unheard-of "too indie for you" things; they're popular. Think of something like "Delver," or "Eldritch" and "Space Engineers" (the two games Drew recently showed off). You'll have to trust me or do a little Googling to find all the prominent other examples of this, as I can't just name-drop them all up off-hand. Similar to those close spin-offs and direct clones you have games like Terraria, which by itself has become massively popular and now ostensibly has two "sequels" in production from its original creator and a separate from its lead artist. Then you have to think about how many games have come out with "craft" in the title, leaning heavily on the kind of digging and crafting mechanics propelled by Terraria (and, by extension, Minecraft). There have been many, many of this as well; the Quick-Look Brad recently did of "SteamWorld Dig" comes to mind. Same here: search for these games and you'll find plenty. (I also frequent game dev communities where about 30% of every game showed off is inspired by Minecraft). Then you can also go into how the single game of Minecraft has spawned an enormous zeitgeist in the lives of many all around the world, reaching the hands of elderly and toddlers alike. Even some classrooms have adopted using Minecraft to teach kindergartners cooperation, and I'm sure some kind of geometry or some... thing. I think only Mass Effect and CoD 4 have had consequences within the industry great enough to be placed above Minecraft.
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