According to YouTube on the company’s official blog, 2020 has been a huge year for gaming on the video platform, reaching up to 100 billion watched hours across over 40 million active channels. Among these billions of watch hours, Minecraft has risen to the top-build position on YouTube, massively outpacing even the closest reaching competitor.
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In terms of views, Minecraft has raked in 201 billion views over the year, almost tripling the next highest game Roblox and the 75 billion views it managed to rake in. The next in line for the top five include Garena Free Fire, Grand Theft Auto 5, and Fortnite, with only the popular battle royale failing to reach 70 billion views throughout 2020. All of these are impressive feats on their own, but with Minecraft dominating over 40% of the views from all top five games combined, the classic title is still securely on top for YouTube.
Even when taking live broadcasts on YouTube into account, where Roblox is no longer in the top five and Garena Free Fire has risen to the second spot, Minecraft is still in the top spot. This is also reflected both in Minecraft’s 600 million active players, and in consistent viewers on other platforms like Twitch, where at the time of this writing, the game is currently in the #2 spot, right under the Just Chatting category. It’s likely that the surge earlier this year brought a lot of content creators and streamers back to the game, especially as the rollout of new games became much more scarce in 2020, but the explosion is still massive for a game from a decade ago.
Content creators on YouTube have always been able to rely on Minecraft for drawing in a large crowd, due in part to the limitless ways that players can interact with the game. Combining this with Minecraft’s modding community that rivals even the likes of Skyrim, and it doesn’t look like the game’s reign at the top is going anywhere soon. Mojang’s golden goose is too big to topple at this point, even if some fans theorized that YouTube has tried to before.
Minecraft is available now for Mobile, PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
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Source: blog.youtube
