YouTube Gaming

» see gaming.youtube.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the last time i watched other people play games for hours, it was around 2003 and i was standing behind them in a turkish internet cafe waiting for a machine to come free. that is the closest thing to twitch culture i have any real memory of, and it was involuntary. by 2015 i was thirty-one and working, and the idea of downloading a separate app to watch strangers play was not a thing i was ever going to do.

youtube shipped it anyway, and the reason was amazon. in august 2014 amazon bought twitch for a bit under a billion dollars after google's own talks to buy the same company fell through. so youtube, which had been carrying game videos since the site existed and had every large gaming creator on it already, watched the live half of its own category get bought by a competitor. youtube gaming was the response, announced at e3 in june 2015 and launched on 26 august, on the web and on both phone platforms at once, in the us and the uk.

the product was reasonable. twenty-five thousand games each got their own page, pulling together the live streams and the recorded videos for that title in one place, which was genuinely better organized than twitch was at the time. the search box would not confuse the game called destiny with the word destiny. streaming was easier to start than on twitch, and the archive of every stream stayed on your regular channel afterward, which was a real advantage that twitch took years to answer.

none of that mattered. the thing youtube was competing against was not twitch's software, it was the habit of a few million people who already had twitch open, and the thing youtube gaming was competing against second was youtube itself, where every one of those gaming creators still posted and every one of their viewers already was.

~ the record ~

~ the twitch problem ~

youtube's structural advantage was enormous and it went unused. more people watched gaming content on youtube than on twitch for the whole period, by a wide margin, because youtube had the recorded video side of the category almost entirely to itself. what it could not take was live. live viewing is a scheduled social habit rather than a search result, and habits move when the people you watch move, not when a better feature ships.

the creators mostly did not move, and the ones who might have were expensive. by 2019 both microsoft and facebook were writing large exclusivity checks to individual streamers, which is what a platform does when it cannot win on product. youtube did some of that too, later. splitting the audience across two apps for four years while that fight went on was the opposite of useful, and internally somebody clearly did the math.

~ what really happened ~

the decision was announced in september 2018 with an unusual amount of honesty: the separate app had never gotten the numbers, gaming would become a destination inside the main youtube app instead, and the standalone would close. the apps came off the stores in march 2019 and both the app and gaming.youtube.com stopped working on 30 may 2019, three years and nine months after launch. the address now hands you the gaming section of ordinary youtube.

one detail did not survive the move. subscriptions and the games you had followed inside youtube gaming did not transfer anywhere, and google said so in advance rather than pretending otherwise. so the people who had done the work of building a watch list on the smaller app got nothing for it, which is the usual price of using the second app a company ships for something it already does in the first one.

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