How many hours of gaming content are watched on YouTube each year?

How to get close to this number

Multiply viewers by hours. Billions of people use the platform, a substantial minority watch gaming content, and a regular viewer watches several hours a week. Hundreds of millions of viewers times tens of hours a year gives a total in the tens of billions of hours, and the leading category pushes past a hundred.

The observation in the explanation is the genuinely strange one: more people watch others play games than play them. That relationship holds for no other participatory activity at this scale — far more people cook than watch cooking, far more people drive than watch driving. Gaming is the only major hobby where spectating outgrew doing.

The reason is that games are natively broadcastable. The screen a player looks at is already a finished video feed, so the production cost of turning play into content is zero, and a medium with zero production cost for spectator content generates an enormous amount of it. The statistic is downstream of a technical accident.