Popular sandbox game ‘Minecraft’ get 1 trillion views on YouTube

Minecraft, the extremely popular sandbox game, has crossed a trillion views on YouTube, making it the most-watched game content on the video-streaming platform. YouTube in collaboration with Minecraft developer Mojang, is celebrating an unprecedented trillionth view with a snapshot of the game’s unique and transformative history on the platform.

Minecraft’s chief storyteller Lydia Winters attributes the game’s trillion views to her team’s respect for the myriad ways players use Minecraft to tell their stories.

“We have people who are off on an adventure and people who are building and people who are playing together, and all those ways of playing are important to us,” she tells The Verge. As Minecraft’s chief storyteller, her team’s job is to create and curate a world players want to create in. That enabling of all kinds of storytelling has been critical to the game’s nigh untouchable popularity.

“The reason why Minecraft has been so successful on YouTube is because YouTube videos are a way to tell stories,” she says. “So then when you have Minecraft, and you can tell any story you want in a Minecraft world, it’s a big reason why we have so many people creating Minecraft content.”

“All those ways of playing are important to us”

By the numbers, Minecraft’s YouTube community has over 35,000 creators from over 150 countries. The kind of content on YouTube ranges from simple role-playing “Let’s Plays” to videos that don’t feature actual gameplay from Minecraft at all.

Earnest Pettie, culture and trends insights lead at YouTube, is responsible for keeping track of all the weird and wild ways players use Minecraft on the site. He’s fascinated by one creator in particular who uses the Minecraft aesthetic and is popular within the Minecraft community without actually playing the game.

“Interestingly, one of the biggest trends on Minecraft is actually animation, and that’s animation either created with Minecraft or animation that is derived from the Minecraft aesthetic,” Petite says. “There’s this creator named Jake Fellman, who creates YouTube shorts. He’s created about 100 Minecraft-inspired shorts that are actually computer animation. He’s one of the most viewed Minecraft creators of this year.”

Fellman’s videos are 15-second bursts of hyper-realistic, “What if Minecraft graphics were rendered with the Unreal Engine 5” shorts that feature cute interactions with monsters or sheep and garner over 1 million views a pop.