Gaming is universally loved but that does not mean that all games are universally loved. As evidenced by a plethora of bizarre JRPGs which never find their way to the West and relatively weak sales of Microsoft’s gaming consoles and related titles in Japan, it’s obvious that very few games have a global appeal like Candy Crush does. In an effort to identify the most popular games by region, a group of YouTube employees decided to analyze the number of views that the most popular YouTube games get and arrange them in accordance with their approximate place of origin. This obviously isn’t a perfect method for figuring out the most popular video games by region but it’s at least more than good enough to identify the most popular YouTube games by region. In the process of analyzing data, the researchers found out that certain games are overwhelmingly popular in only a single country.
While this doesn’t sound strange per se, some given examples are certainly intriguing. Sure, it’s not surprising that the NFL 16 is only a big deal in the United States but seeing how Russians still prefer to watch the Ukrainian horror FPS/RPG hybrid S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to anything else is definitely interesting. According to YouTube, Poland is basically the main reason Farming Simulator videos are relevant online while Brazilians apparently love to watch people play LEGO Marvel’s Avengers, which is another curiosity seeing how LEGO games are usually universally loved and one would expect that a crossover with Marvel’s characters would also be a big thing in the US.
Furthermore, it seems that by far the most popular YouTube game in Japan is GungHo’s casual puzzle RPG Puzzles & Dragons. Sure, it’s a Japanese game so it makes sense that it’s a big thing in its home country, but we’re not talking about people playing it but watching YouTube videos of other people playing a puzzle RPG. That still isn’t as strange as the fact that Germans are apparently in love with an indie point-and-click adventure Deponia which originally came out in 2012. In a similar vein, it’s hard to understand what prompted people in France to suddenly start watching videos of a niche Flash-based MMO Dofus from 2004. For more curious examples of popular YouTube games by region, refer to the image below.