YouTube Gaming Launches Platform For Video Gamers

Home » Poker News » YouTube Gaming Launches Platform For Video Gamers

Thursday, August 27th, 2015 | Written by Shane Larson

On Wednesday, August 26th, Google responded to the increasing popularity of Amazon.com`s live streaming gaming product called Twitch, by launching one of its own known as YouTube Gaming. Since Twitch first came on air back in 2011, the platform has grow to become a major player in the digital gaming industry, and more recently in the online poker arena, too, after Twitch changed its real-money gambling terms of service in spring. As a result, online poker has been enjoying a resurgence in popularity with the younger demographic of late, as they tune it to watch professional poker players such as Jason Sommerville streaming their live sessions on Twitch. This begs the question whether YouTube Gaming is now intending to compete with Twitch for a share of the online poker audience.

Gaming Videos Huge Draw For YouTube

YouTube visitors spend billions of hours each month watching gaming videos, with one of the site’s biggest gamers, PewDiePie, boasting a massive 38,905,004 subscribers, and 53,449,378 views. Needless to say, gaming videos are a huge draw for YouTube, and commenting on the launch of YouTube Gaming, YouTube’s head of gaming Ryan Wyatt said:

“We wanted to create a one-stop shop for all gaming content. At the moment there is a fragmented experience. People go to different places for live content, and YouTube for video on demand. We have amazing gamers that don’t live stream yet. Now they have that opportunity.”

Twitch’s Videogame Streaming Monopoly

Twitch enjoys a virtual monopoly of the video game streaming market, with more than 100 million unique viewers each month, and 1.5 million broadcasters. Last year, Amazon bought Twitch for $970 million, and Google has since responded by improving its live streaming technology in order to better compete with the site, and accommodate the needs of its own video gaming base. Innovations include enabling customers to upload their videos which run at sixty frames per second, and using an HTML5 backend which allows for faster, smoother streaming than Twitch’s Adobe Flash video player. This groundwork has paved the way for its new service, YouTube Gaming, whose pleasant design and smooth functioning presents a direct challenge to Twitch’s model. In other words, YouTube has designed and launched a product which does the same thing as Twitch, only more effectively. This should worry Twitch as the site could easily erode much of Twitch’s customer base, whilst also building on its own massive community.

Platform To Enhance YouTube Service

YouTube said its new platform will enhance the site, and benefit all of YouTube users across a range of interest, including “sports, beauty tutorials, live cooking streams”, etc. Nevertheless, YouTube Gaming will still be held to the same standards as far as “third-party content” policy is concerned, including the use of music and other copyright claims. Elaborating further, Ryan Wyatt said gaming would not be treated any differently on YouTube, before adding:

“The app is a lens for gaming content, the key thing is discoverability.. Gaming is a specialist topic but YouTube is a generalist outlet. Establishing a new platform means it can skew the features to better suit gamers. Competitors such as Daily Motion and Twitch will continue to emerge and YouTube has to keep up.”

Competing For iPoker Audience?

The new YouTube Gaming product allows the main YouTube site to filter its existing video games and direct them to a single video gaming skin. However, YouTube Gaming currently has no dedicated poker category, and a site search of the word “poker” returns Zynga Poker as number one, and the World Series of Poker channel number six, while PokerStars, PokerStarsTV, and the European Poker Tour do not even receive a mention.

Furthermore, according to YouTube online poker streaming will not be included in its initial YouTube Gaming service, indicating that YouTube Gaming is currently more interested in narrowing its focus on Twitch’s traditional market of eSports and video gaming. This in turn may encourage Twitch to concentrate more on those areas currently not covered by YouTube Gaming, including poker. At this early stage, YouTube Gaming therefore does not offer anything new that live online poker streamers cannot already obtain on Twitch. That said, things may change in the future as circumstances evolve over time.