According to an article on The Verge, the biggest game of the year on YouTube is Minecraft. That’s right folks, it isn’t PUBG, Fortnite, or League of Legends – it’s Minecraft.
Back in January, PCGamer highlighted the massive difference in concurrent players between some of today’s biggest games. PUBG had 3 million players regularly logging in, Fortnite was up at 40 million, and Minecraft loomed over the two with roughly 74 million active players. These statistics are over 6 months old and a lot of things have changed since. In there announcement for their Summer Skirmish tournament, Epic Games
Still, the fact that Minecraft is one of the biggest games on YouTube remains. Ryan Wyatt, YouTube’s director of gaming content and partnerships says that despite the massive popularity of Fortnite, Minecraft remains the “biggest game globally” and that “Fortnite has not taken off in every single market.”
There are couple of interesting things to note about this. The first is that it just goes to show that AAA-titles backed by giant budgets aren’t the only games that have a shot at being #1. Contrary to what some Japanese developers believe, money isn’t the only ingredient for success.
These numbers also reveal how around the world, different countries have different top games. Often times this has a lot to do with the game’s ability to resonate with local culture, or could be due to ease of access. If it’s not easy for you to acquire computers with top-of-the-line specs, chances are, you’re more likely going to be playing less resource demanding games such as League of Legends or Minecraft, rather than PUBG or Fortnite.
Wyatt also pointed out how one of the biggest growths in gaming on YouTube is for mobile gaming content: “when you start to look at these other countries and regions, we’re actually seeing explosive growth from the mobile gaming category that’s pretty underrepresented in the West.”
Given how nearly everyone has a mobile phone, it’s by far the easiest type of game to access. He goes on to state:
“I think there are a lot of things that are happening outside of the US, outside of Western Europe, that are causing a lot of growth for gaming on YouTube that are kinda understated.”
Western game developers should take note of these facts. There’s a lot of untapped potential outside of North American and Western Europe with mobile games.
