It might be over a decade old at this point, but Minecraft is still absolutely dominating the gaming world. According to YouTube's annual report, the block-building behemoth was the most-watched game on the platform in 2019. More to the point, no other game came close to touching it. Mojang's globally beloved title held the top spot by tens of billions of views.
Let's take a look at the numbers, shall we? In 2019, Minecraft managed an incredible 100.2 billion views on YouTube. You need only take a look at the rest of the top five most-watched games to get an idea of just how much it absolutely dominated the competition. Fortnite, the immensely popular battle royale, came in second place with 60.9 billion views this year. That's barely over half of what Minecraft pulled in.
Fortnite was followed by GTA V with 36.9 billion views. In fourth place we have a mobile battle royale title that I have to confess I'm not familiar with... but Garena Free Fire managed 26.9 billion views, so it must be doing something right. Not too far behind in fifth place, we have Roblox with 29.6 billion views. You can check out the full year in review for yourself below.
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Minecraft has always maintained a healthy presence on YouTube, of course. This is doubtless thanks to countless tutorial videos, let's plays, and popular YouTubers exploring the many wonderful creations of other players.
2019 has seen a real resurgence in interest for the game, though. By August this year, the blocktastic survival sandbox overtook Fortnite as the most-searched game on YouTube for the first time since 2017. Much of this success was likely down to the massively popular creator Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg, who started a new series of Minecraft videos back in July.
Kjellberg's Minecraft series was an instant hit, leading to the creator's biggest month in years. In July alone, he pulled in over 570 million views, which in turn led to a huge uptick in Minecraft content among the YouTube community. Keemstar's weekly Minecraft tournaments, for example, were also more than likely another key factor.
All in all, I think we could possibly consider 2019 as Minecraft's biggest year yet. Outside of YouTube, the game has been going from strength to strength. Last month, it was reported that the number of registered players sits an incredible 480 million. That's if we include both traditional paid sales and the registered accounts for China's free-to-play version of the game.
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For context, with 480 million players under its belt, Minecraft would effectively be the third-largest country in the world, behind China and India. So yeah, that's... a lot.
Registered players and active players aren't the same thing of course. At last count Minecraft still had a respectable 112 million active monthly users, which is of course still huge.
"What we find is that it's a game that players keep coming back to," Mojang studio head Helen Chiang explained in a recent interview with Business Insider.
"It may not always be the one that's in the forefront, because there are a lot of great games that continue to come out, but it's one that they love to return to."
Not to brag, but we recently recognised Minecraft's immense popularity and ongoing success by ranking it third in our list of the 25 best games of the decade. So yeah, go and check that out.
Featured Image Credit: Microsoft