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Introducing YouTube Gaming, Twitch’s Competitor

August 29, 2015 By Michael Turner Leave a Comment

YouTube Gaming is Twitch’s main competitor. YouTube was already a big player, but Google doesn’t want it to become old and stale. The big G, starting with the 26th of August, has begun promoting YouTube Gaming as a separate dedicated website and app aimed at, go figure, gaming.

Users who want Call of Duty search results won’t have to go through Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe.

Yet, this wasn’t the main problem.

Esports popularity has grown tremendously over the past five years and Twitch was the main hub for it. Google can’t let this happen. If they succeed in their endeavor, if the company manages to separate different gaming content, they can rest assured that people will use it.

If you build it, they will come.

Lui Calibre, whose site has 3.5 million subscribers, holds a cookie in the shape of the YouTube Gaming App’s heart logo. Photo: Susan Karlin.

YouTube Gaming resembles Netflix when it comes to watching a stream. It stays true to it roots, but you won’t notice the vanilla components that made the video service popular. Comments can be seen on the side, you can give a streamer either a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down and you can subscribe to their channel.

It’s really not that hard to use, and I’m inclined to think that the main YouTube page would benefit from looking like this.

The biggest difference lies in its essence. It’s gaming-oriented. There’s a list where you can see what games are trending, there are featured channels, and there are even landing pages for certain games.

Results are divided into categories like live shows, popular videos and pre-recorded Let’s Play vids.

The Android app looks a lot like Twitch’s, but its desktop counterpart is more fine-detailed. It looks sleeker, better organized and easier to use.

But this isn’t how you poach users from Twitch. Better features and great content creators will, however. The benefit of rewinding a stream in case you’ve missed its beginning is definitely a start.

Currently, Twitch’s most viewed channel racks-up approximately 32,000 viewers. YouTube’s most popular channel has around 11,000 – these may be users who are just trying out the service. Also, because YouTube features channels on its front page.

People don’t think of YouTube as a live streaming hub, but they’re starting to.

YouTube Gaming - PewDiePie Content Creator

Felix Kjellberg aka PewDiePie

Let’s take PewDiePie. He’s a huge part of YouTube and YouTube Gaming. He creates content especially for the video service. Because he uses Google’s video platform as his second home, he keeps people coming back.

If Felix Kjellberg decides to leave for Twitch, the majority of his fan-base will leave along with him. I’m curious to see if dividing YouTube in two will be worthwhile for Google, or if it’s a big mistake.

What do you think? Is Google making a mistake? Will Twitch reign supreme? Tell us in the comments section down below.

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Google is Set to Launch YouTube Gaming for Streamers

June 15, 2015 By Nancy Young Leave a Comment

Google has just officially announced that they will tackle video game streaming with their new YouTube Gaming. It feels like a direct attack to Twitch and their service.

Google’s new platform will add all of Twitch’s features, while sporting a few new ideas of its own. Gamers will be able to share their original content as easily as they would have on Twitch.

YouTube Gaming is set to launch sometime this Summer, and users can be a part of the new platform by sharing Let’s Play content, and other live streams, in a different hub – separate from YouTube itself.

According to product manager Alan Joyce, and his statement on the YouTube official blog – ” YouTube Gaming is built to be all about favorite games and gamers, with more videos than anywhere else. From Asteroids to Zelda, more than 25,000 games will each have their own page, a single place for all the best videos and live streams about that titles. You’ll also find channels from a wide array of game publishers and YouTube creators.”

Alan also added that their new platform will be centred around live streaming, but the company doesn’t discourage gamers to upload their original content. As you might have known already, YouTube Gaming will let gamers easily live stream at 60 frames per second, automatically converting their video without problems.

The platform’s in-built search engine will be modified around games, so if you are to search for Lego, you’ll get Lego Worlds, and other Lego related game results, and not videos about the real-life Lego bricks.

YouTube Gaming will be Twitch’s direct challenger, which is now the go-to place for video-game streamers around the world. Twitch is owned by Amazon, and their latest report states that they have a monthly audience of over 100 million viewers at the end of 2014.

Google will be present at this year’s E3 conference, and they will most likely detail their new live streaming platform. What we do know at the moment is that their new service will be launched in the US, and UK. For those of you living in Europe, don’t despair, the platform will come eventually – maybe even at the end of 2015, but rumours have it that it will be released sometime in the early 2016.

PewDiePie is the most known Let’s Play streamer.

It is unknown at the moment if Google will offer this service to Asia, Australia, or other zones.

If you want to be notified about details regarding YouTube Gaming, follow their official channel on Twitter – it’s up and running!

I can’t wait to stream playing The Witcher 3 – I need to let people know how much Roach sucks, and what a bad horsey he is!

Are you going to change venues from Twitch to YouTube? Tell us in the comments section below!

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Possible Twitch Data Breach, Company Advises Users to Change Passwords

March 25, 2015 By Michael Turner Leave a Comment

It was announced by Twitch that there has been a possible data breach and that users should change their passwords to avoid any data theft.

Twitch is a platform that allows gamers to live stream all of their games over the internet. It was introduced in June 2011 and it focuses on video gaming. It also broadcasts e-sports competitions and other gaming-related events. Twitch is now owned by Amazon, after it purchased the platform in 2014 for a whopping $970 million.

Twitch officials have revealed that the company’s servers might have been hacked and content, such as user’s private information may have been stolen by hackers. Included in that private information are also credit card numbers and credit card expiry dates. Because of this major security breach, Twitch is advising all of its users to change their passwords as soon as possible.

Twitch has explained that it expired all the passwords and stream keys, for the safety of its users and it has linked all of the user accounts to Twitter and YouTube. The next time users are going to try to log in, they are going to be prompted to change their passwords.

Twitch has also sent out mails to all the users who the company think might have been affected by the hack. In the email, the company says hackers may have stolen the user’s email address, the IP address of the last device used, the username and the last four digits of the users’ credit cards and expiration date. The first and last name, home address, phone number and birthday may also have been pilfered.

Twitch highlighted in the email sent to users that they do not process, nor store full credit or debit card information, so the number of the card is safe.

Twitch has not yet revealed how it managed to find the potential hack and the company also refused to estimate how many users have been affected by the security breach.

A little bit over one million of Twitch users stream their games online over the platform. An estimated number of 100 million people from around world are tuning in to watch these livestreams, it was revealed by Twitch in its 2014 annual report.

In terms of peak Internet traffic, Twitch is the fourth biggest website in the world, behind Netflix, Google and Apple. If the security breach did indeed happen, then there is a potential threat that could affect millions of people all over the world.

It was just last week that Twitch went offline for several hours. A spokesperson for the company revealed that the shutdown was due to an internal tech issue and it was in no way related to the hack.

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