Early Summer 2015, YouTube had announced that it was throwing its hat into the game stream arena and essentially pitting its self against Twitch. And while this might have seem far fetched at the time, YouTube had been making moves to get its self ready, such as adding a streaming option, 60fps playable among some of them. Gaming their new service, YouTube Gaming, YouTube had its first first large scale test when it streamed opposite of Twitch, the 2015 E3 event.
And most notably the stream quality was deemed far superior to Twitch’s stream, with more reliable servers / less drops and resolution fall backs.
In addition to this, gamers who own Android devices were able to get a sneak peek of the YouTube Gaming app (including myself) noted that the app was leaps and bounds better than what is currently available for the Twitch app. Streaming is flawless, 1080 60fps playback, the interface is smooth is fast and more importantly, the search option does what it’s supposed to do.
Trust me folks, this app is good and that’s not just hype.
Fast forward to today, or tomorrow I should say as YouTube has announced that their YouTube Gaming platform will be launching as of tomorrow. Starting tomorrow, YouTube Gaming will be live at https://gaming.youtube.com. It will be interesting to see once the doors open if popular streamers that current frequent Twitch will make the switch, or at very least test the waters to make a decision as to who is the better service.
Update: For those who emailed me asking about I didn’t talk about Youtube’s HTML5 playback and the fact that Twitch doesn’t have it, is simple. Twitch actually does have HTML5 playback and it was announced / made aware of since July. However it’s still considered “alpha” and is slowing being rolled out. Twitch made a post about this as well, which you can check out here.
Still there are a few unknowns, such as how YouTube plans to play streamers and how strict the service will be compared to Twitch, especially when it comes to in-game music. I know several steamers have stressed their frustrations of streaming a game that includes popular mainstream music, only to have Twitch mute the entire segment and basically wrecked the entire recording. How will YouTube address these concerns? On that same note, will they be more proactive compared to Twitch, when it comes to policing their streams (Titty Police) and will they enforce YouTube Gaming for games and only games?
Early on while using the YouTube Gaming app, I encountered several streams that were no where near related to gaming and I’ll leave it at that. And of course, how can gamers embed their streams on their sites and pages. Sure, we know you can already do that but I’m looking at some more akin to how Twitch gives you a personalized link and that link is directly to your own space vs having hundreds of embed codes
I guess we’ll wait and see when tomorrow comes, won’t we?
Round one starts, tomorrow!
