By: Towards the end of the year, sites like YouTube begin to reveal viewing statistics about content consumed on their platform. For 2020, there were some fascinating insights about what gaming kids are spending their time, a lot of time watching. Click here to see the full overview of YouTube gaming trends for 2020!
- More gaming content is being viewed on these platforms than ever before. Minecraft is the most viewed gaming content with a mind blowing 200 billion views. Although some might criticize Minecraft because of the graphics, the reality is that kids love playing Minecraft and watching others create in Minecraft. In 2nd place is Roblox with 75 billion views.
- The number of opportunities for gaming creators to build large subscriber bases is increasing. In 2020, 80,000 gaming creators hit 100,000 subscribers; 1,000 gaming creators hit 5 million subscribers; and 350 gaming creators hit 10 million subscribers. This shows that there is a tremendous opportunity for those who are talented at creating content around gaming to find success on streaming platforms. Overall, we can see that there are less than 100,000 people who are generating the majority of the subscriber base. However, this is still much larger than those who have traditionally been able to monetize their talent in entertainment. So, YouTube has effectively helped expand the talent base for creators.
- The top 2 games have the ability to customize content by modifying the underlying code. While watching content might suggest that kids are more interested in consumption versus creation, these 2 games being at the top of the list suggest that kids are not just wanting to play games as is but are instead wanting to learn more about how to change lines of code to better customize for the individual preferences.
- Kids are just as likely to play games that were developed before they were born as they are games that recently launched. Both Minecraft & Roblox were initially launched more than a decade ago. Yet, they continue to remain at the top of the charts in terms of kids viewing behavior.
- Live gaming stream hours are increasing. Of the 100 billion total hours of gaming content viewed on YouTube, 10 billion of those hours were live streaming. In the middle of a global pandemic, we should not be surprised that live streams are increasing. This means that there is an increasing opportunity for those who are quick on their feet and can engage an audience to enjoy success on a platform that has more historically with production content. However, we would expect this trend to continue even after our daily lives return to normal as audiences are hungry for new and different types of content that they can engage with.
Gaming behavior trends, especially among the next generation, is often indicative of future preferences. As we look at the YouTube viewing stats for the gaming vertical, we can see that there are going to be some areas that will continue to grow going forward. We also can expect kids who are into gaming will likely utilize these same preferences as they seek careers to utilize their talents. Similar to Elon Musk who highlighted that video games prepared him for success in his career, I think we will see a lot of current gamers make a similar claim once they enter the workforce or begin to launch their own startups.