Fortnite accounts for 94% of views for YouTube’s biggest stars

Take a look at the trending tab for YouTube’s gaming section, and you’re met with an awful lot of Fortnite videos. While that’s partly to do with the tremendous success of Epic’s battle royale, it’s also indicative of a wider trend which is seeing the industry’s biggest stars playing fewer and fewer games. YouTubers are still posting the same number of videos, but according to analytics firm Fancensus (via gamesindustry.biz) the number of games that feature in those videos has shrunk dramatically. In 2016, the number of unique titles covered by the top ten influencers on YouTube sat at 383. That number dropped a little in 2017, down to 326, but by the end of 2018, the site’s ten biggest gaming stars covered just 28 games between them. A lot of that is down to Fortnite, which accounted for 94% of views for YouTube’s top ten. Its prevalence is such that in all of 2018 eight out of those ten influencers published a combined total of just 87 videos that weren’t related to Fortnite.