YouTube improving live streaming service YouTube Gaming

YouTube has clearly been the dominant force when it comes to internet videos over the last 12 years. In 2015, the platform decided to chase Amazon’s live streaming service, Twitch,  by launching their own live streaming version of the site called YouTube Gaming. YouTube Gaming has been met with some very negative criticism since its launch. With incredibly long delays, Minimal emotes, channel moderation, and a very basic user interface. It seemed like YouTube Gaming was just not handled the way people expected it to be. With the incredible success of Twitch, it seems like YouTube Gaming was a poor competitor.

Lately there have been rumblings of YouTube Gaming reshaping the site and adding new features to hopefully stoke the fire. Now one of the official developers in a Reddit post seems to confirm that. The user BarbaraEMac has posted about some of the upcoming new features for YouTube Gaming. The site had been testing out their version of monetary subscription buttons called “Sponsorships,” with some of their higher end content creators. In the post however, YouTube Gaming is opening sponsorships up to content creators with at least 1000 subscribers on the platform.

The site looks to seriously upgrade their chat experience. Featuring new sponsorship badges, custom emoji’s, and highlighted chat text called “Super Chat.” The Super Chat feature can highlight donations and is aimed at getting the content creators attention.

Another big fix YouTube looks to aim for is cutting its delay to very small duration. Per an anonymous YouTube content creator, The platform is looking to cut their latency to about 2 seconds. Which, in my opinion, is a significant upgrade to the platform. The site has been suffering from very long delays since YouTube Gaming launched in 2015. Which has turned a lot of users off of the live streaming service and forced to pursue other options.

Only time will tell if these features can pull users back into the live-streaming platform of YouTube. In my personal opinion, if the platform is aiming to compete with other live-streaming sites, like Twitch and the new hot upcomer Mixer from Microsoft, YouTube needs to completely revamp the YouTube Gaming experience. YouTube Gaming needs a complete overhaul to separate itself from the main site and establish itself as its own platform. I feel like only then will users start to take it more seriously. If you’d like to check out the Reddit post you can find it here .