YouTube Gaming’s Ryan Wyatt on gaming’s explosive growth in 2020

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
December 8, 2020
Updated June 18, 2025
11 min

The year is just about over, and perhaps the only things worth celebrating about 2020 are the memories of the hot videos on YouTube Gaming.

This year, fans watched more than 100 billion hours of gaming content on YouTube — about double the previous year. Live gaming streams created more than 10 billion watch time hours on YouTube, and there are now more than 40 million active gaming channels there. More than 80,000 YouTube Gaming content creators have hit 100,000 subscribers. More than 1,000 are at 5 million, and more than 300 have hit 10 million subscribers, according to Ryan Wyatt, head of YouTube Gaming. I interviewed him about the year and what was popular.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.