Reddit’s 2021 recap is out, and based on its data report it looks like Redditors really loved Genshin Impact, Final Fantasy 14, League of Legends, and Grand Theft Auto role-play in 2021.
The most-viewed community for the year was r/genshin_impact, followed by r/leagueoflegends, and then the general gaming hub r/gaming. In fourth place was r/rpclipsgta, a subreddit dedicated to “everything GTA [role-play] related,” followed by r/ffxiv, which likely thrived thanks to the anticipation and ultimate release of the Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker expansion in December.
Related to GTA role-playing, Reddit’s roundup notes that r/NoPixel — a subreddit dedicated to a specific GTA RP server — saw a 267% increase in views year over year. Other subreddits with massive spikes in 2021 included r/pokemonunite (with subscribers up a whopping 8,600% year over year thanks to Unite’s launch in July), r/deltarune (subscribers up 328,000% thanks to a new chapter release in September) and r/biomutant (subscribers up 9,500% from last year).
As for top posts, the most upvoted gaming post of the year was entitled “boy gamer” and features a webcomic satirizing the experience of being a woman playing online games and having everyone in voice comms remark on it. Other top posts included the news that EA no longer has exclusive rights to make Star Wars games, predictions for Worlds 2021, a clip of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showing off her League of Legends play, and a meme about switching from World of Warcraft to Final Fantasy 14.
Unfortunately, there’s not a great way to compare these stats to previous years, as Reddit didn’t do a gaming-specific recap for 2020. We did get a few 2020 numbers suggesting that Animal Crossing was really, really popular (who knew!) and that other popular games on Reddit that year included League of Legends (again), Minecraft, Fortnite, and Destiny. In fact, the League of Legends subreddit seems to be a pretty popular place to be every year, as in 2019 it joined the Fortnite, Destiny, Minecraft, and World of Warcraft Classic communities in the top five.
Genshin Impact, meanwhile, appears to have thrived thanks to a simply absurd amount of updates over the past year, including tons of new characters, challenges, quests, and a whole new region in Inazuma. We nominated it for best ongoing game of 2021, and when we reviewed it back in 2020 we found it to be an “amazing open-world adventure that draws heavily on both its Breath of the Wild and anime inspirations to create something truly special.”
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.