“You have this really unique live interaction you don’t get with YouTube videos,” said Meg Kaylee, a streamer and host on GameStop TV who built her career playing various games on Twitch after starting on YouTube. “It’s a completely different experience.”
Citing Twitch’s fervent audiences and the “better job” the company does in communicating with talent, Ms. Kaylee, 20, added that she had never really considered signing up with YouTube Gaming.
Other Twitch competitors include Mixer, a comparatively small service from Microsoft that hopes to capitalize on the success of the company’s Xbox gaming console. Twitter has entered the field by bidding aggressively to broadcast e-sports on Twitter Live, while offering its live-stream platform, Periscope, as a gathering place for gamers. Facebook has also been scrambling to get in on the growing medium, courting individual gamers and adding the ability to tip streamers on Facebook Live as part of its “gaming creator pilot program.” (Earlier this month, the company also launched a centralized portal for gaming content called Fb.gg.)
Facebook Live, Periscope and Mixer all grew quickly in the last quarter, according to Streamlabs, but none have approached the scale of Twitch. The number of those watching game streams on Facebook’s platform, for instance, increased to 56,000 from 27,500, according to the firm’s estimates.
Even with the rise of live streaming, gamers have continued to do big business posting recorded videos on YouTube’s main site, which reports 1.8 billion “logged in” users a month, making it much larger than Twitch, which claims around 100 million monthly viewers. Mr. Wyatt, the YouTube executive, noted the full scope of YouTube’s gaming content, which includes the videos posted on the main site and the live streams on YouTube Gaming, in comparing it with the Amazon-owned platform.
“The size and scale and businesses is not comparable from YouTube to Twitch,” Mr. Wyatt said. “Everything that I’ve seen indicates that video-on-demand will be the biggest part of gaming content consumption.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/business/media/amazon-twitch-video-games.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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