The end of the year is nigh and that only means one thing: It’s YouTube Rewind time. One thing we apparently still love to bits is a little 10-year old game called Minecraft. After a decade of building, tunneling, exploring, and getting crept up by Creepers, YouTube is apparently still the place to be for all things Minecraft.
Every year YouTube makes a video highlighting all the important stuff that happened on the platform that year. Ironically, last year YouTube Rewind 2018 was also the most disliked video of the year. This year the billion dollar company decided to turn down the production value and go for a more traditional top-list in all sorts of categories.
And of course, YouTube wouldn’t be as big as it is without the help of the gaming community. To make that statement quantifiable: in 2019 alone gamers watched 257.5 billion videos of the top 5 biggest games. And over 100 billion of those views are attributed to Notch’ revolutionary game Minecraft.
The full top 5 most viewed games on YouTube (2019) are:
- Minecraft – 100.2 billion views
- Fortnite – 60.9 billion views
- Grand Theft Auto V (and Online) – 36.9 billion views
- Garena Free Fire – 29.9 billion views
- Roblox – 29.6 billion
Now, there’s a couple of surprises in the list, starting with: what in the name of YouTube is Garena Free Fire?! A quick Google search shows us it’s a free to play battle royale game for mobile. Apparently it’s a huge deal in Asia and South-America but chances are you’re from an English speaking country so we’ll stick with ‘what in the name of YouTube is Garena Free Fire?!’
Another surprise is the fact that Fortnite is the number two of 2019. Minecraft has always had a huge appeal to gamers from all different ages but through 2019 it felt like literally everybody with a smartphone, PC, console, or smart fridge was playing Fortnite. Still, Fortnite was forced to give Minecraft the title as Mojang’s pride pulled in over 66% more views.
Of course, Minecraft is still the undefeated champion as biggest game ever, so it makes sense that it ended up on number one. But still, with the widely publicized pre-Chapter 2 event and the insane cultural impact of Fortnite one would be forgiven for thinking it would beat a decade old pixelated game.