You may not have noticed, but this past summer, YouTube rolled out its new gaming service. The new website, creatively named YouTube Gaming, is part of a YouTube rebrand which has been unfolding over the past year, with the website adding paid subscriptions in the form of YouTube Red and launching original series. One of the main differences between this new interface and the old YouTube layout is the focus on live streaming as opposed to pre-recorded gaming content. The interface is clearly designed for live streaming. The top right hand corner implores you to ‘GO LIVE!’ and once you make your gaming preference selection, a stream will autoplay right smack-dab in the middle of your screen. With the new move towards highlighting livestreaming content, YouTube is clearly encroaching on the territory of the most popular streaming site of all – Twitch.
A few minutes on the site and the Twitch similarities become undeniable – For example, viewers can now pay a monthly subscription fee which adds badges and grants access to an exclusive subscriber-only chat. The interface lets you pick streams based on which games you’re interested in (like on Twitch) and the streams have a live chat next to the video (like on Twitch). Both services also recently added ‘Chat Replay’ feature, which lets users who are re-watching a livestream also read the chats as they happened.
The website itself seems like a good idea, and it is obviously well executed. The interface looks slick, and the ability to add games you to your preferences is pretty cool – so why isn’t it a bigger deal? Well, one of the reasons is the lack of promotion on YouTube’s part. Sure, it was announced, but anyone who doesn’t follow YouTube on social media and who doesn’t read gaming news on the regular probably missed it, because one key component was missing – advertising by YouTube ‘stars’. The issue was mentioned in detail by PewDiePie and Cinnamontoastken, (two well-established ‘gamers’ on Youtube) in a BroKen podcast episode from the 1st of July:
P: “One of the things – which might have completely gone under your radar – it that YouTube started their streaming service.”
C: “Yeah I haven’t really looked into that yet, I have no idea how that works. They just followed me on Twitter and I was like – who is this?” [laughter]
P: “Yeah they Tweeted at me something (sic), they’re trying really hard to make everyone excited for it.”
C: “Is it live? Like, up, now?”
P: “Like, that’s the thing, I don’t even know. Like if I wanted to stream now – I have no idea if I can even. It seems weird that they would launch the thing before you can even do it, right?”
C: “Yeah. What I wanted to know, does it do like the old [streaming option] where it plays on your channel and sends everyone who subscribes to you over there (?)”
P: “I don’t know! It’s so weird because you could do that four years ago, like what is it now?”
…
P: “It’ll be interesting to see where it goes. The thing is, though, why was, like, did anyone know about this? I had no idea about this.”
C: “Kind of came out of nowhere.”
P: “It didn’t come to anyone’s fucking mind to reach out about something like this? No? Nowhere? Just be like ‘hey, we’re adding this new thing, maybe you could have some feedback on it?’ Sorry, I’m just being salty again.”
BroKen Podcast, “Dog Challenge (BroKen #16)”, 1 July 2015
It seems that the original idea was to separate a channel’s YouTube subscribers from their YouTube Gaming followers.[4] Looking at the YouTube Gaming channel pages, however, this doesn’t seem to be the case; if it is, it’s certainly not obvious. Every YouTube channel, regardless if they’ve ever broadcasted live or not, has their own Youtube Gaming profile. Their regular YouTube subscriber count is visible, but the sponsorship statistics are hidden, like they are on Twitch.
Each stream has two buttons underneath it – ‘Sponsor’ and ‘Subscribe’. Pressing the sponsor button does the same thing as pressing the ‘subscribe’ button on a Twitch stream – it brings up a window which tells you to pay x amount of dollars per month for perks. The confusing thing about this is that the ‘subscribe’ button on YouTube just makes you a normal YouTube subscriber, as it would if you were to subscribe through YouTube’s normal interface, which doesn’t cost any money.
Switching over to the channel page (I chose to go to the page of the streamer that was featured on my front page) shows something similar – plus, the aforementioned YouTube subscriber count, which is still visible. Clearly, despite the fact that YouTube has been trying to push YouTube Gaming as a new, separate innovation for gamers, they’re hoping for a mass crossover of viewers from regular Let’s Play style content into livestreaming. The problem is, of course, that in order for them to do so they’d need to know that YouTube Gaming existed.
Despite the fact that the livestreaming aspect of YouTube Gaming hasn’t quite taken off yet, Twitch seems to be feeling the heat. In addition to the ‘Chat Replay’ feature, they also recently announced plans to let users upload content without livestreaming it first, thereby bypassing one the key aspects of what the site was intended for. The fact that Twitch (and YouTube) are upping their game (quite literally) isn’t surprising when there’s roughly 3.8 billion dollars of revenue at stake.
So it seems that, despite YouTube’s best efforts, Twitch is not dead yet. In fact, the website seems to be thriving, especially when it comes to new, hotly anticipated releases. When Fallout 4 released this past fall, Twitch drew in ten times the amount of viewers in the first few hours after release, simply due to the fact that people wanted to see the gameplay footage as soon as possible, and Twitch is still the most familiar website for viewers. However, there is hope for YouTube Gaming. One of the biggest problems, as highlighted above, is that the YouTube creator community doesn’t seem to have embraced it, and YouTube Gaming seems to have given up trying to make itself known. Since YouTube undoubtedly still has the upper hand in terms of viewership, if we’re counting pre-recorded content as well, there is huge potential for YouTube Gaming. It’s had a rough start, but who knows. This time next year, maybe we can say that Google truly did build a Twitch killer.
Ready Player Five 