Minecraft tops YouTube list of most-watched video games in 2019
With a staggering 100 billion views.
Minecraft is, by far and away, the most popular video game on YouTube, according to new figures released by the video platform as part of its end-of-year round-up.
To celebrate the imminent evaporation of 2019, YouTube has unveiled its latest Rewind video, offering a brisk, but still almost entirely insufferable, run-down of the things viewers have fixated on the most over the last 12 months.
The most pertinent section (for us at least), arrives around the 2:30-mark - but if you'd rather not subject yourself to YouTube's nonsense, allow me to supply the key details.
This year's fifth most-watched video game, with an impressive 29.6 billion views, is online creation platform Roblox. That's followed by free-to-play mobile battle royale game Garena Free Fire, with 29.9 billion views. Next up is Grand Theft Auto 5 with 36.9 billion views, and just missing the top spot at two is Fortnite with 60.9 billion views.
The clear winner, however, still holding off the competition over a decade after its original release, is Minecraft. According to YouTube, developer Mojang's much-loved survival sandbox adventure beat Fortnite to number one by over 40 billion video views, managing to accrue a staggering 100.2 billion views in 2019.
Minecraft has, of course, long been a firm favourite on YouTube, but it's had something of a resurgence on the platform in recent times. Controversial YouTuber Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg returned to his Minecraft roots in a video published in June this year (the game featured in his first-ever YouTube video nine years earlier) pulling in over 34 million views.
Since then, PewDiePie has regularly returned to Minecraft, and other big-name YouTubers, such as Sean "Jacksepticeye" McLoughlin, have followed suit - all helping propel Minecraft past Fortnite in terms of video views for the first time since January 2017.
It has, of course, been Minecraft's year in many ways. Not only did the game celebrate its tenth anniversary back in May, figures released by Microsoft at the time suggest that Minecraft, having now sold over 176 million copies, could well be the best-selling game of all time.