The YouTube Gaming app shuts down this week | Hacker News Reader

The YouTube Gaming app shuts down this week

arstechnica.com

64 pointsgcatalfamo31 comments

This is actually a shutdown that makes sense to me: why would it need a separate app/website? I don't think it was actually really useful for most people:

* As a standalone gaming streaming service, I don't think it ever had the potential to dethrone Twitch, for various reasons already said by other commenter

* On the other hand, if you are a heavy YouTube user, it doesn't add anything: almost all features are available in the main YouTube app.

Basically, it always seemed redundant to me.

IIRC YouTube Gaming was created to establish streaming on YouTube. When it was created, they didn't allow streaming on the main YouTube app. That all changed in about 2015, when they started bringing the livestreams in to YouTube proper.

I feel like this article misses the point when it describes the lack of content creator/viewer interest as not being a market leader. The rhetoric from the gaming content creator YouTube community is that the money for twitch is just flat superior to whatever you could make on YouTube in the current market, and they can collect what they can by dumping the VOD's on YouTube. I didn't see any evidence that YouTube Gaming did anything to fix that or any of the other problems that seems to be plaguing the individual/small group content creators when it comes to Content ID, mature video tagging, or probably some things I am forgetting.

I think if the YouTube Gaming property did more to separate itself identity-wise from YouTube (even if it was just YouTube under the hood) it would have stood more of a chance. Maybe it was a good test pool for live streams, chat, and that sort of thing but it felt like those things were already started (a search indicates it was kicked off YouTube Live in 2011 where YouTube Gaming started in 2015).

Plus many content creators in games have been driven off youtube proper by DMCA accusations. So some twitch streamers have completely abandoned their YT side simply because it is far easier to harass them on that channel than within twitch itself. Youtube is a damaged brand in many of these content creator's eyes

then throw in that twitch pretty much hit a home run last summer/fall with the ability to easily gift subscriptions and many streamers saw their numbers explode. Once you have an audience if you are in popular categories you can get sponsorship for playing specific games and that is money not easily recouped by changing platforms.

The subscriber + hours viewed restriction to monetize combined with rampant copyright take down trolling, an algorithm that hides your content from viewers and adpocalyses just made the Youtube gaming platform not worth anyone's time.

Why would anyone put up with that mess when Twitch is simple, works well and is designed from the ground up for game streaming?

For one thing, gamers who used to upload recorded game play to YouTube left _years_ ago to live stream on Twitch. Second, YouTube's treatment of creators I'd say has people primed to go anywhere else. So too little, too late, wrong attitude towards the people making content. Finally, Mixer at least has a few cool features, such as Hype Zone. Pretty sure YouTube gaming didn't offer anything appealing/innovative.

I actually used Youtube Live (as a viewer) a bit and found the experience inferior to Twitch.tv . You could see the effort of Google devs to clone the best features from twitch, but they just did a ~bad~ job. From the graphics/material design, chat, etc., none of it would have even breathed life if it didn't have Youtube/Google's userbase pushed into it.

Google product owners need to ask themselves, would this business be viable without the artificial stimulus of existing Google users? GCP - yes. Youtube - yes. Youtube gaming - no.

So they are just killing the alternate UX, the content is still there just needs to be accessed via the main youtube website

I'm pretty sure they're only killing this because it's going to compete with Stadia whenever it gets released.

Stadia/YouTube stands a very good chance at being a Twitch killer. Gaming is natively digital, so linking that data in a native way will make life very hard for Twitch.

Twitch is more than just game-streams and overall works well now. What relevant difference can stadia make? AFAIK it's just a cloud-service, not something that fundamentally would change the game-experience?

You can directly link into and share game states. I presume that a variety of interactive observer modes would also be fairly trivial to accomplish based on their architecture. This experience will be significantly different to normal YouTube and Twitch. It won't kill Twitch, but the viewing method will be different and likely eat into their market.

1 million x reason not to stay loyal to any google products. they get killed in a flash

Wasn't gaming a thing during this year's IO?

the old silicon valley adage :

'move fast and break people's trust in your brand's product longevity, thus alienating anyone from actually using it.'

I might have got that saying wrong..

No kidding. After Google killed Inbox, I'm going to be a lot more wary of trying out Google's new products. That and releasing half baked products like Allo/Duo are why no one uses Google's new products and then years later Google ends up killing it for not reaching enough people.

Another addition to https://killedbygoogle.com/

Except not really, as it was just rolled into the main app and website.

https://www.youtube.com/gaming

There's a lot of stuff listed on that site that didn't actually go away, just got rolled into something else or rebranded. It's not very picky about what it chooses to list as "killed".

Also according to Google, Inbox was rolled into Gmail but I think most people would agree that Gmail still lacks a lot of the important features that pulled people to Inbox in the first place.

RIP Inbox. You won't be forgotten.

it still works (more or less) if you use an old APK

I had never even heard about this product until just now. I guess it was just too irrelevant.

Same. I watch Twitch and YouTube videos, too.

Google are getting very good at this whole shutting down of something which doesn't quite make the usage levels that they want even though it might be very popular. Surely this burning of the end user will get old to consumers at some point and they will go elsewhere.

There's a youtube gaming app? Amazing.

Yeah, it's about time for Google to kill another product.

What has Google killed other than Altavista?

Here you go: https://killedbygoogle.com/

I mean killed in the market, not bought and shut down.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

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