Published on: 03/08/2021

YouTube Gaming Making Progress

Although Twitch is the leading live-streaming website, YouTube Gaming is making strides to catch up in popularity and accessibility.

Besides hosting stars, YouTube Gaming is refining its streaming features, allowing users to enhance their audience interactivity and generate further excitement.

How exactly is YouTube Gaming making progress for its creators? Let’s take a closer look to find out.

YouTube Gaming’s Recent Growth

Starting as a standalone service in 2015, YouTube Gaming’s popularity grew to all-time highs in 2020 for viewership, user size, and live streaming.

By the end of 2020, the feature clocked in 100 billion watch hours and 40 million active gaming channels. Of the channels, 80,000 reached at least 100,000 subscribers. For live streaming, 10 billion viewing hours were generated by its creators, the most popular of which include Valkyrae and CouRage.

According to Stream Hatchet, as of H1 2021, YT Gaming brought in 2.7 billion hours watched, up from 2.1 billion (2020) and 1.3 billion (2019), showing steady growth.

Based on this trend, YouTube Gaming is regarded as one of the leading streaming platforms today, with no sign of stopping anytime soon.

YouTube Gaming Recent Updates

In mid-July, YouTube announced three updates to the Gaming feature that enhances users’ engagement with their favorite content creators.

The first change is the addition of the clipping tool for gaming creators with 1,000 subscribers and above. With this, users can clip specific moments from an online gaming video or broadcast and share them in their respective feeds.

The second is the introduction of subscriber-only chats for streamers looking to moderate their broadcasts. Streamers can restrict chats to only subscribers, and they can also decide how long their viewers need to subscribe for before participating in the chat room. Also, when turning on sub-only chat, the stream will notify the audience of the switch.

Finally, live polls can be created by streamers, bringing another interactive aspect to the ever-changing platform. Polls can range from two to four options, last for 24 hours, and they can only do them while live-streaming. They do not appear in live chat replays.

Why Should Streamers Be Excited About the Updates

YouTube Gaming continues to compete with Twitch by emulating the latter’s features–albeit with their own flair. Furthermore, it offers an enticing space for streamers searching for a platform to organically develop their content and audience.

Besides YouTube Gaming, the abundance of other platforms like Facebook Gaming allows streamers to choose a foundation for their career. However, with the site’s growth in viewership and recent updates in accessibility, users are growing more fond of its resultant practicality.

Expect YouTube Gaming to remain in the conversation for top contenders in the live streaming sphere.

Written by Pedro Romero