A typical YouTube Playables game had about 290,000 plays on 23 September 2026. That is the median of the 1,669 games live that day in Dubit's YouTube Playables tracker, so half had fewer. A quarter had fewer than about 110,000 and a quarter more than about 1.1m. The figures are the lifetime play counters YouTube shows on each game, which YouTube rounds. A counter keeps rising from the day a game joins YouTube Playables, so the median mixes new games with old ones. The counters count plays, and one person can account for many.
Most plays went to a small number of games. The whole catalogue had about 4.8bn plays on the counters that day. The ten most-played games accounted for 17.9% of them, and 57 games between them accounted for half. The most-played 10% of games, 167 in all, accounted for 76.6%. One game in ten had more than about 7m plays. That skew lifted the mean to about 2.9m plays per game, about ten times the median.
Older games have had longer to collect plays than newer ones. Games removed from the catalogue before 23 September 2026 are not counted. Each figure is an aggregate across the games the tracker covers, never one game's count.
How many games are on YouTube Playables, and which genre is the biggest?
On 23 September 2026 Dubit's tracker counted 1,669 live YouTube Playables games, and Brain & Puzzle was the biggest genre by games and plays. It had 622 games, or 37.3% of the catalogue, and took 23.6% of all plays.
Simulation was second by plays, with 22.3% from 197 games, or 11.8% of the catalogue. Arcade had the second-most games, 332 or 19.9% of the catalogue, and 14.3% of plays. Action had 17.1% of plays from 166 games, and Racing 13.3% from 95. A game's genre is the one YouTube lists for it on the day of the count.
Is there a gap in the YouTube Playables catalogue worth building for?
Dubit's tracker can show where plays went against how many games each genre has, and it cannot show demand going unmet. On 23 September 2026 Racing took 13.3% of plays from 5.7% of the games, and Simulation took 22.3% of plays from 11.8% of the games. A typical Racing game had about 1m plays and a typical Simulation game about 650,000. Only Multiplayer, which had nine games, had a higher median plays per game than either.
Brain & Puzzle ran the other way. It had 37.3% of the games but 23.6% of the plays, and its median of about 170,000 plays was the third-lowest of the 11 genres. Board & Card had the lowest median, about 110,000, and 1.8% of plays from 5.0% of the games.
Brain & Puzzle additions climbed in most months from October 2025 to July 2026. Dubit counted the Brain & Puzzle games still live on 11 August 2026 by the month each was added. They included 10 added in October 2025 and 82 in July 2026. Games delisted before then were not counted, so earlier months' additions were likely higher.
A few hits can carry a genre's share of plays, so each share needs reading beside the genre's median. Multiplayer had the highest median of the 11 genres, about 2.8m plays, from nine games.
