What you are seeing is that, even though Virgin is huge and expensive and provides a lot of value, the industry is competitive and very little of that value is profit to the owner. Whereas Minecraft has a niche and is very profitable.

Why do investors ever park their money in airlines?

"If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline." --Richard Branson (on starting Virgin Atlantic)

"Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down." – Warren Buffet, who invested in US Airways in the early '90s, on airlines in 2008

It's a really profitable industry these days. Low oil prices reduce costs. Plus, ticket prices haven't gone down because routes are consolidated to reduce competition between airlines.

"Want to be a millionaire? Start with a billion dollars and start an airline"

~ Richard Branson

Edit: Didn't see the same quote below!

Haha! Well if you compare that way, there are numerous examples of a piece of software doing well(or have more market cap) than a physical company with many machines and thousands of employees!

There was a Tumblr that had a list of things that are cheaper than Whatsapp's $16B acquisition. It's pretty insane how much bigger of an industry some things are over others.