The numbers from YouTube don’t lie — when it comes to gameplay videos, WB Games’ Mortal Kombat X is a hit.
The latest entry in the bloody (and popular) fighting game series managed to handily crack the top 20 game franchises on YouTube, according to numbers reported by Octoly and Newzoo. Although it wasn’t successful enough to knock mainstay MineCraft out of the number one slot, it still fared very well since its mid-month debut, jumping nine places for the month with an overall growth rate in views by 170 percent.
The chart, posted below, highlights the 20 most popular games for the month. Gaming videos made by fans comprised 98.2 percent of overall views in the top 20, with some drawing into the billions of views for the month.
Leading the pack is Microsoft’s MineCraft, which continues to dominate with nearly four billion views and a 34 percent overall take of the top 20. However, close behind in second place is Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, which saw a boost in popularity with its video editor tool, introduced in the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V. It maintained a steady count of 1.3 billion videos, or approximately 12 percent of overall views for the month.
Other games, like Five Nights At Freddy’s, Call of Duty and League of Legends rounded out the top five, with League taking a two-notch rise over the previous month. However, the real surprise here is Mortal Kombat, which gained 332 million views for the month, or three percent overall. With the release of X, the game franchise jumped nine places from the previous month, with 97.5 percent of fan videos overall.
In addition, franchises like Game of War, Assassin’s Creed and Pokémon debuted in the top 20 for April, while familiar favorites like Battlefield, Team Fortress and World of Tanks dropped a few notches — even though all the franchises have well over 100 million views with their fan videos, indicating that they aren’t dying down in popularity anytime soon.
It just goes to show that there’s always room for “new” blood to enter the picture in the top 20 — and this week’s forthcoming release of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt could catapult that franchise into May 2015’s list easily, considering its pre-release hype.
The full top 20 is below.
