YouTube v Twitch: battling for viewers, but both can grow

Soon, ridiculing the idea of watching other people play video games will seem ridiculous in itself. People do, and in increasingly large numbers online.

YouTube has “hundreds of millions” of people watching “billions of hours” of gaming videos every month, with its top 100 games channels generating 7.3bn video views in July 2015 alone.

Meanwhile Twitch – the service bought by Amazon in 2014 – has more than 100 million monthly viewers watching its live and archived gaming video-streams for an average of 1.5 hours a day.

Together, YouTube and Twitch have made games – from walkthrough “Let’s Play” videos to live eSports tournaments – one of the fastest-growing television genres, almost entirely outside the traditional television industry.

For most of this category’s history, YouTube and Twitch have not been in direct competition: YouTube’s gaming focus was on videos shot, edited and uploaded to its service, while Twitch’s was on live streams of gameplay and chat.

In the space of the last month, though, that has changed. First, YouTube launched its YouTube Gaming app, with its emphasis on live streams as well as recorded videos accompanied by new features for channels streaming gameplay live on the service.

Now Twitch is moving into YouTube’s heartland of recorded videos. The company has announced plans to enable its broadcasters to upload videos to their channels, as they would to YouTube.

Twitch users will also be able to create playlists from their archives, essentially meaning their channels broadcast 24 hours a day, rather than only when they are online and streaming live.

Both YouTube and Twitch are making a similar pitch to their video creators: use one service for everything, rather than dividing their attention between two. Until now, many games broadcasters have used both services: uploading videos to YouTube and streaming live on Twitch.

Minecraft gamer Jordan “CaptainSparklez” Maron is one of the most prominent examples: his YouTube channel has 8.8 million subscribers, while his Twitch channel has 1.2 million followers.

“So many people who I know, although they still do YouTube, Twitch has become more and more of a major thing – myself included,” he told the Guardian in August.

“It’s a cool, different way to interact with people: they can give you direct feedback in the chat in Twitch, which is something you can’t get on YouTube. It works very well for games, and it’s a little bit more casual than YouTube: you can take a break, answer questions from the chat, and mess around a little bit more.”

As YouTube gets more like Twitch, and Twitch gets more like YouTube, Maron and the emerging crop of gaming personalities will be choosing whether to throw their lot in with one of the platforms, or continue to divide their energies (and audiences) between the two.

YouTube Gaming is unlikely to be a “Twitch-killer”, and vice versa: as more brands shift portions of their advertising budgets in the direction of these audiences, there is scope for both to prosper.

Meanwhile, the battle between two platforms backed by big-tech parents will be healthy, as YouTube and Twitch compete to provide new features for their creators and gaming viewers alike.

For live streams especially, that’s important. This is a television format combining gameplay footage, video feeds of players and live chat between those players and their viewers – and between the viewers themselves. The language of this format is still developing, not to mention the business models around it.

That’s why the competition between YouTube and Twitch is about more than each service adding new features to move on to turf occupied by the other.

Too much of the outside world – the media industry included – still struggles to understand why anyone would find entertainment in watching other people playing games. But it’s those burgeoning audiences on YouTube and Twitch that are defining how their respective cultures and communities evolve, which will in turn be the key influence on this new entertainment genre.