Block-building and wood-punching simulator Minecraft might be trailing behind popular esports titles like League of Legends and Counter Strike: Global Offensive on livestreaming sites like Twitch.tv, but it still leads the pack on YouTube. According to market research firm Newzoo, Minecraft once again topped the video game charts on YouTube with over 3.9 billion views for the month of March alone.

For a game that is nearly six years old, Minecraft is still going strong, and the numbers from YouTube and Twitch show that the game’s community is as big as ever and likely will not be going anywhere anytime soon. According to Newzoo’s data, only .01 percent of the Minecraft videos watched on YouTube were official content made by the game’s creators. The other 99.9 percent were all fan-made creations, and Mojang AB is just fine with that.

“We have a whole slew of people who are making their entire living just off making videos about Minecraft,” Mojang COO Vu Bui told The Guardian in an October 2014 interview. “Just the economics of that – how many people are making a living off this one IP – is pretty awesome.”

He added, “That doesn’t take anything away from us, and I would say it actually adds value to Minecraft, to have people who are extremely talented and creative doing things. We’ve essentially outsourced YouTube videos to a community of millions of people, and what they come up with is more creative than anything we could make ourselves.”

YouTube vs Twitch

Like Twitch, YouTube’s most popular games change little from month to month. An exciting new game may sometimes rise to the top, but it will usually fade away while veterans like Minecraft and League of Legends weather the storm.

But it is also interesting to note that Twitch and YouTube offer very different content formats, and games that may be popular on one service might not enjoy the same level of success on the other.

For example, League of Legends is still the king of Twitch, accounting for roughly 30 percent of all hours watched for the month of March. Minecraft trails behind in fifth place on Twitch, accounting for around 5 percent of the hours watched.

The two games’ positions are almost perfectly reversed on YouTube, with Minecraft accounting for about 32 percent of the views of games in the top 20.

Image credit: Mojang (c)