YouTube Gaming hits 100 billion watch-time hours, Minecraft leads

YouTube Gaming has revealed that 2020 has been its biggest year ever, with 100 billion watch-time hours -- double the number of hours watched in 2018 -- and over 40 million active gaming channels. Of that 100 billion watch-time hours, 10 billion were of YouTube Gaming live streams, signalling a strong competition for Amazon-owned Twitch.  The Google-owned platform said out of 40 million active gaming channels, 80,000 channels hit 100,000 subscribers this past year.

More than 1,000 channels broke 5 million subscribers in 2020, while more than 350 channels hit 10 million subscribers. "In fact, there has never been a better time to be a YouTube Gaming creator. Over 350 gaming creators reached a whopping 10 million subscribers," said Ryan Wyatt, Head of Global Gaming at YouTube. Minecraft was the most-watched game on all of YouTube, with more than 200 billion views of live streams and uploaded video watched this year.

The next most-watched game on the platform was Roblox with 75 billion views. Other games in the top 5 were mobile battle royale Garena Free Fire (72 billion), Grand Theft Auto V (70 billion) and Fortnite (67 billion).Creators like LazarBeam, Lyna, MortaL, CouRage, TheDonato and Typical Gamer are streaming exclusively on YouTube. "We've seen Valkyrae grow to become one of the biggest female live streamers across all platforms since she started streaming exclusively on YouTube," Wyatt said.