Youtube To Start 'YouTube Gaming'

YouTube already has streaming functions and they seem to work better than twitch. Gaming channels make up like 60% of the top 100. It's probably more to do with targeting advertising than competing with twitch. It makes sense when you consider most people don't use Google+ accounts to watch YouTube and their AdSense relies heavily on history for targeted ads.

Twitch's thoughts in a nutshell:



I'm mildly curious what YT intends to bring to the table here. Depending on how they handle subscriber interaction, monetization, quality options, etc it could potentially be an upgrade over Twitch for those streamers that aren't able to take advantage of everything the latter offers due to size or other factors. Several streams I keep up with have had to work around Twitch policies in the past, which has been a frustrating experience for all involved.

The only thing they can do different than Twitch is have a different set of ToS.

For anyone new to Twitch, Twitch added new rules "recently" regarding nudity and non gaming content.
It didn't stop big money people to stream themselves cooking half drunk (also not allowed) and other girls to stream entirely naked, but still, they're sometimes enforcing it.

Youtube has better streaming quality than Azubu or Twitch, but Twitch doesn't *** up enough to motivate people to move there. There is also a community spirit that exists (fighting games etc).
Azubu on the other hand offers contracts to keep people.

So, for Youtube to pick up people, they'd have to 1) be more lax than Twitch regarding the ToS, 2) offer contracts and 3) hope that Twitck *** up enough for Spooky to jump ship.

Good luck to Youtube.

I streamed on Youtube for about 10 minutes once and got 58 copyright claims on my account.

Should be fun for all involved.

Why would I want to watch someone else play a video game when I could... I don't know play the game myself ?

Because watching some people play games can be entertaining.

I had my first YouTube account closed because of FFXI and FFXIV copyright claims on music.

Game publishers have caught on, excluding Nintendo, and see the value of let's plays. When I'm thinking of buying a game, the first thing I do is check out some let's plays and see if it's something I'm going to like, since game publishers rarely release demo's these days.

*broadcasts a beautiful cutscene that has nothing to do with actual gameplay*

I disputed all claims I had on my account. I won all claims.

Usually it's youtube itself which trigger the copyright strike. Annoying.

Conversely gaming companies have also tried to stamp out negative reviews as seen in cases like SimCity and The Order 1886.

Does wind me up when they do that, which is probably why I'm actually psyched for Fallout 4 because they had the great idea to show gameplay and it looked good.

And they've received a rightly deserved amount of bad press over it. Nothing better for the consumer than bad companies outing themselves.

Because it's fun in its own way (not to mention less expensive, and good streaming commentary is a nice bonus), or because watching sometimes provides unique opportunities that normal gameplay wouldn't. Look at Twitch Plays Pokemon for example. Twitch is also an invaluable resource for competitive communities because watching and analyzing high level play is such a great way to learn and refine your own play, as well as providing an entertaining experience.

Many reasons.

You may be a new player wanting to learn a game, or some of its mechanics/contents, and it's a good way to do so since you can discuss with the streamer about what they're doing.
You may simply enjoy someone's personality.
You may really enjoy someone personality.
The only legit one: tournaments.

As a general rule, plebs (and that's precisely your thought) will only watch a stream, and that's it. They will spend X hours of their day watching a stream, maybe participating in the talk, writing wall of texts that nobody will read in the tiny chat, asking questions no one will ever answer because said questions are HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE, and so on. This is the usual stream viewer, or stream monster as they're called in some communities. Those people are more or less a waste of data but are pretty useful to pay 4,99$ for a subscription.

The advanced viewer will have two screens and will play/watch a movie/work/whatever as they listen to the stream, or watch it randomly. These people understand what a stream is for and have some kind of maturity toward it.

And then, you have the person who understands the true value of streams and doesn't need any more than that: this guy watches tournaments only, whichever they are. That being said, if we're talking LoL for example, Youtube will provide a better quality.

There are many reasons to watch streams but at the end of the day, the reason is very personal and is more often than not objectively HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE, but not for the reason you'd think.

That's actually one of the bad points.

Outside of very specific fighting games, most if not all of the commentaries offered are down right garbage for 2 reasons: fake hype that nobody care about and simply Bronze level of game analysis.

There is a huge difference between a Yipes, a James Chen, a LoL shoutcaster and whatever ***I have heard when I watched various Smash streams.

And whenever you dive into anything that is way below "professional" standards, outside of the 2 our of 10 guys who are really clean and trying to offer good commentary, all you will get is HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE nonsense.

Rosterteeth has a weekly podcast called "the patch", and that's basically what they do.

I agree that good commentary is hard to come by in many communities, but where it exists it's welcome. As someone who mostly watches specific matches for analytical purposes, I just tune out the bad stuff.

Don't get me started on Smash commentary... almost all of it is terrible. The crowds are often somehow worse.

They may not have to do anything. Youtube is far from the first to try and compete with Twitch. Azubu, Hitbox.tv, etc. Twitch is still the clear leader in its field. They often work with the community even now.