With the release of YouTube Rewind 2019, statistics have been made public which reveal that Minecraft dominated YouTube views for this year
At the end of every year, YouTube releases their YouTube Rewind 2019 video, a showcase of celebrities and content creators that are acceptable to companies that pay to have ads on the service and generally does a fairly poor job of highlighting YouTubers that actually make any kind of quality content. Since the boom of online streaming a few years ago, video games have become a central pillar within the YouTube Rewind videos, with Fortnite taking up plenty of screen time in 2018. While it can be fun to see popular video games thrown in with some of YouTube’s most renowned creators, it’s perhaps more interesting to see the numbers behind these inclusions. While many might still suspect Fortnite of taking that top spot, what’s interesting is that it Epic Games’ battle royale shooter is only second on the list, being beaten out by Minecraft.
According to YouTube’s own numbers, Minecraft was the most viewed video game on the platform for 2019 with 100.2 billion views across different videos and creators. In comparison, Fortnite received 60.9 billion views which is a shockingly wide disparity between the two most viewed games. In third place was Grand Theft Auto V with 36.9 billion views, Garena Free Fire taking fourth place with 29.9 billion viewers and Roblox coming in fifth with 29.6 billion. The last two do stand out as surprising to me because while I know what Roblox is, I admit to have never heard of Garena Free Fire which is apparently a mobile-only battle royale game that’s become a massive success in Brazil and China.
I’m no media expert but I’m willing to bet that the popularity of Minecraft this year was in no small part due to the Pewdiepie Effect, a phenomenon that sees games played by the world’s most popular streamer rise in prevalence across the board. Minecraft saw a huge resurgence this year as Pewdiepie began dedicating his channel to Minecraft Let’s Plays as a means to avoid much of the political backlash that he has received over the past year.
Last Updated: December 6, 2019
