Minecraft has become the first video game topic to accumulate a trillion views on YouTube.
The crossing of this milestone was announced by the video-sharing platform's official account, with a commemorative music video that parodies the Starship song "We Built This City". Featuring Minecraft specific lyrics like "We built this city on lava" and "block by block we're building, just how high can we go?", it also contains a bunch of popular characters from the game itself singing along.
In addition to the announcement video, YouTube has temporarily updated its logo to reflect this landmark achievement, featuring a big one trillion figure right next to the red play button. An entire "Trends" page has also been set up, where you can learn more about how Minecraft became such a global phenomenon online.
One particular highlight from this is a comprehensive timeline that breaks down all of the key moments in the game's rise to prominence, like when the Yogcast began their "Shadow of Isphael" series in 2011 or when PewDiePie returned to the community after a lengthy hiatus.
Looking through the pages, you can also identify what type of content has contributed most to that one trillion views figure. In case you were wondering, it turns out that animation is the top Minecraft category on YouTube right now, followed by "Minecraft But" videos. If you are confused by what the latter is referring to, this is where creators showcase their ability to manipulate the rules of the game by doing things like making you grow at an exponential rate or causing items to multiply whenever you walk.
Other enduringly popular genres include speedruns, parodies and videos from the role-play servers like Dream SMP (which has become so huge that it now has its own genre on Spotify).
How Popular Is 'Minecraft' in 2021?
Minecraft has always been exceedingly popular on YouTube, having emerged as the platform's top game of 2020 with over 201 billion hours watched.
Of course, it would be difficult to attain that record-breaking success if people weren't actually playing the sandbox title in the first place. On that note, during a recent Minecraft Live broadcast, Mojang Studios revealed that over 1 billion hours have been logged in the game's multiplayer and that it has reached a staggering 141 million active users per month.
For context, that's not quite as much as Fortnite (which is estimated to have a player base of 350 million and 3.3 billion hours logged) but it's still far bigger than most other releases. As such, it is safe to say that Minecraft is not only one of the most popular games in America, but worldwide too.
If you want to get started creating YouTube content about Minecraft, one of the first things you should look into is how to create your own server. To help you with this, Newsweek has prepared a detailed guide here.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
