This is not a definitive guide to YouTube Gaming. This is one asshole’s experience checking out the service everyone’s talking about today and drawing anecdotal conclusions while saying “fuck” sometimes.
Today, I was curious to see what kind of wrenches Google would throw into game streaming. While I saw both strengths and weaknesses, it doesn’t seem like Twitch has much to worry about, at least in the short term.
The numbers are pretty good, however. For every YTG stream I saw with only a few viewers, I saw another with a few thousand. You’d expect that from something with the userbase and name recognition as YouTube. But does the Twitch userbase have reason to suddenly uproot? Nah, they’re fine for now.
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YouTube Gaming Really Sucks
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Shares this flaw with Twitch
Just like Twitch, a video will just start playing upon arrival on YouTube Gaming's main page. An advantage is that it has the sound off, a disadvantage is that instead of preferring eSports and storyless shit, many users are reporting dropping right into the middle of spoiler-tastic moments of Until Dawn, a brand new game whose shock and suspense are kind of the point.
I was lucky to just get some tool playing Minecraft.
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Also, the auto stream is HUGE
Also, the video that plays automatically is fucking gigantic.
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How do I scroll?
If I try to drag my scroll bar down, the mouse decides it has grabbed something and wants to drag it. If I move the mouse toward an arrow to scroll that way, I get icons of hyper-popular streamers that I don't really give a fuck about jumping all over my cursor.
Maybe this problem is just me? So I looked around...
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Nope, not just me
Looks like other people take issue with the scroll-wheel-only design.
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I searched and HOLY WHAT THE FUCK
I searched a game I've enjoyed recently, Persona 4: Dancing All Night, what I got was two videos and a young woman wearing nothing but a sullen expression.
I can't tell what that video of the naked woman is, because there's no video description under the title. I have no idea if that's just her...um...her usual thumbnail or what.
What I do know is that I'm gonna have to turn around and explain that icon being up for my search results if someone walks by.
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Same Search on Twitch
While there is a streamer of questionable relevance, Twitch provided generally more worthwhile search results, including a livestream of the game's latest DLC. Nice.
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Sponsored videos not marked well
It's well known that some YouTubers are paid and/or given favors from publishers in return for streaming their games. YouTube Gaming's interface and its lack of descriptions and, hell, lack of information in general prevent the viewer from knowing what's the player's actual impression of a game and what he/she is being paid to say.
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Not available
German users can view Twitch just fine, but disagreements between Google (owners of YouTube) and GEMA (Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte) hold back a lot of YouTube Gaming's streams. It surely seems small to those outside of Germany, but it is an entire fucking country whose potential support is totally out the window.
(Image via Robert Menzel on Twitter)
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More accommodating in some ways
YouTube gaming is a little more accommodating to your schedule than Twitch. I dropped into a live broadcast of, some boring guy playing EVE Online and could immediately rewind. I jumped back to an earlier part to see him looking around confusedly, and jumped back even earlier to a user asking him what his bitrate was and him saying "I don't know." This pause and rewind thing is huge.
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The Ad thing
This didn't happen to me, so I'm going by reports on GAF on this one, but apparently streamers have no standardization of ads. Different viewers are not only seeing ads at different times, they're seeing them for different lengths, and may even run into a damn 18-minute infomercial.
Though ads eventually pop up a "Skip ad" option, analytics usually show that some users bail out at the first sign of an ad -- it's just a question of how many.
So the streamer is sitting there not knowing who is seeing an ad, how many are watching or not, and is unable to know really how to handle all this. Re-explain what just happened? Catch everybody up? But will that sound redundant? Lotta problems there.
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YouTube Gaming has YouTube comments
All of this is anecdotal, of course, but I've seen far fewer assclowns on Twitch than YouTube. Granted, I only tend to look at streams by people I actually know instead of strangers (weird, I know), so maybe that's something? Anyway, YouTube Gaming has wasted no time in inviting YouTube's unique brand of shitty class warfare/racist/everything-ist commentary.
YouTube's comment section is notoriously hellish, so it will be interesting to see how un-policed this remains with YouTube gaming.
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The 404
I'm not sure if this is funny or someone in the board room was just told to slap as many game references as possible onto one sentence.
"Yeah just write some funny joke about like, I don't know, other castle...arrow to the knee...set up us the bomb," and then they never actually finished the page before the site went live.
