The first and top one was YouTube Gaming.  I was completely wrong with that one missing the most important aspect of why Twitch even exists in the first place; and that is its community.  Google has never really gotten these social subtleties (witness Google+) and looks like they never will.

The next one is Trion World‘s (the North American and European publisher of Devilian).  This publisher represents everything that is wrong with not focusing on a high quality player experiencing first versus trying to make any money off of a licensed IP (the actual developer is South Korean based Bluehole Ginno).  I seriously thought this game had a chance to at least carve out a reasonably sized niche but failed to realize just how terrible the publisher actually is (giving them the benefit of the doubt with all that I had heard about them from players who had actually played their first South Korean published MMO, ArcheAge).  There is just to much “bad” that has happened since the game was launched that I haven’t even had the time to put it into a sensible format for posting (maybe I will attempt to when the game is 6 months in which isn’t too far away from now).

And the final one is of course related to the original focus of this blog; Diablo III.  Despite all of the games issues since it launched in May 2012, never did I ever believe that I would become disinterested in the franchise to where I would actually stop caring about it completely.  But that’s exactly the point that I somehow managed to reach in late 2015/early 2016.  And it wasn’t like any one particular moment.  It’s just that there was not even any desire to find out where the game stood in terms of the latest patch, what was planned for that patch, or even logging in once to try and see if things had gotten better.  Like I have zero idea as of this posting what patch the game is on as the last time I even logged on and played was November 9th (around the time of Blizzcon 2015).  I would very rarely load up the Blizzard forums and read a few threads and even more rarely post my actual thoughts but even those were already synopsized snippets that I just cut/pasted.

And that is when I realized what little remaining passion I may have had for the game, was gone.  That is also when I realized that I hadn’t even logged into ANY of Blizzard’s other games.  I hadn’t even completed the Legacy of the Void campaign.  While I could hardly be referred to as a huge Blizzard fan, I’ve been pretty much a captive customer since the 90’s.  The above made me realize that “IT” finally also happened.  That Blizzard has completely lost me as that captive customer where simple cross promotional marketing would somehow keep folks like myself engaged.

As mentioned before, Overwatch (as an FPS) doesn’t interest me at all.  And the only thing I found mildly interesting about it recently was the whole Tracer “butt” thing that I just rolled my eyes at because people are getting offended about that when at its core, the game is about shooting and killing others.  Keyword here is GAME and games have and always been about the un-reality where any well adjusted person would know what is reality and what isn’t.

Now that the site is actually live though, I believe that I was way too bullish about this and that I’m actually wrong that Twitch has anything to worry about.  I myself don’t stream at all but someone (a friend) does casually (and was looking forward to moving over to YouTube Gaming).  Her testing over the first fews days wasn’t a very good experience though.  She also had some good points about her own viewing experience.

One of her first observations was what determines what gets displayed in the Live panel on the main screen.  I believe it is a live feed aggregator that lists current but not all live streams.  I personally cannot say what kind of criteria and/or metrics are used though, and if what is displayed there is randomly promoted.  What I do know is there are lots of more live streams going on than what is displayed here.

An easy way to see this for yourself is to search for a popular game like League of Legends, click/tap the Live link, and see how many live streams are going on.  Than go back to the main page, click/tap More on the Live panel, and see how many of those streams are shown there.

Her other important point was that live streams are mixed with either previous ones or uploaded content when you are looking at specific games.  I have to agree there; by default, the site and app should show all live streams first rather than showing everything that is in the Explore feed.  I know doing it the way they are doing makes it look like a lot of content.

The other obvious biggie is the absence of the console streamer AND viewer; it’s what I noted before in my earlier posts regarding PS4 and Xbox One.  Twitch’s rise really coincided with the launch of these two consoles with their ability to live stream and to also aggregate those console specific broadcasts for viewing on their respective platforms (PlayStation Live for example).  I posted before that the PS4’s 3.0 firmware is planned to have YouTube support.  The thing is that the US beta isn’t going to begin until sometime in September.  I’m not sure about Microsoft’s plans with the Xbox One.

Because of this, YouTube Gaming lacks a lot of this spontaneous type of content from console gamers.  But it also goes beyond this from my own viewing observation even for those streaming using something like a Game Capture HD or desktop game streaming.  As mentioned before, Twitch did the right thing by contractually locking in their top streamers.

Those streamers have a viewership for a reason; it takes a lot of time to build up that kind of following.  And those viewers are a captive audience.  Those streaming on YouTube Gaming that are starting off fresh (not former Twitch partners as an example) will need to effectively build up to that sort of viewership.  And old habits die hard (which is why the general viewer numbers on many YouTube Gaming streams are on the low side for most the popular games when compared to the same ones on Twitch).

This is also where the above mentioned Explore versus Live feed issue comes into play.  When you navigate to any game tile (and that listing is sorted based on total viewers) in Twitch, it displays current live streams; really simple.  With YouTube Gaming (when you select or search for a specific game), it will display everything in the Explore feed.  That includes live games as well as uploaded or archived content.  And this display isn’t the live streams first; it’s all mixed in with the other content using the same relevance filter that is used on the regular YouTube site.  So there are times when a live stream will be at the near end of a bunch of other uploaded content or archived stream.  If you want to just see the live streams, you have to select the Live feed.

And I did notice some streamers (who were testing the service out) mentioning this same thing.  Seems like just a simple click or tap but I see the point given that one of its key features is the whole live stream angle.  The fix for this is simple; they should just default to the Live feed (and if there aren’t any, then the default should go to Explore).

Another thing that I didn’t know is that in order to live stream, you need a verified YouTube account.  This requires a mobile phone number since a code is messaged to perform the verification.  So I checked into this myself and the reason stated by YouTube/Google is this step is required to prevent spam and abuse.

I’m going to be brutally frank on this one; this is going to be a no-go on the console streaming side since people are going to be signing up for an account from there, and many aren’t going to go through this verification procedure.  If you sign up for a Twitch account from the PS4, it doesn’t tell you to verify your account but you can still use it.  The only time that becomes a problem is if a streamer enables verified e-mail for their chat.  A strictly PS4 user will never know this though and would be thus locked out from chat until they check their e-mail, and follow the verification link.  But it doesn’t prevent them in anyway from streaming.

Furthermore, YouTube comments (just like Twitch chat, or any online chat for that matter) is just full of crap to begin with.  As I mentioned before, I’m not a fan of some of Google’s data mining techniques.  All I see is that this is just another way to capture your phone number.

Going back to the streamer that I follow, one of the biggest issues she mentioned though was the archival aspect of ones live stream.  I myself mentioned this was supposed to be its big advantage since what is live streamed is supposed to also be automatically turned into video on demand (VOD) content.  The problem she ran into is that she let her test stream run for just a little under 7 hours but only the final 2 hours were saved as a VOD.  Basically everything else was lost (I asked her to check if it had been split into multiple parts but she says there was only one video).

She mentioned that while highlighting an archive on Twitch is a pain, at least the entire stream is there no matter how many hours.  So she went from someone who was initially looking forward to moving to staying put with both Twitch and Ustream.  She says the site does look much nicer but all of that as well as any technical advantages doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work right on the streaming side.  The way she put it was this; first impressions are lasting ones and this wasn’t a great one.  I have to agree.

Update:  found this article which highlighted just a SMALL number of tweets in the first 6 hours after the service launched.  To be it real simple, YouTube Gaming dropped the ball big time.

The 1080p 60fps video quality is incredible (watching a Heroes of the Storm stream).  The chat is kind of so-so though (they do have their own emoticons) and will need to develop its own identity (though a lot of Twitch-ism is probably going to be used by viewers regardless).

But the site is far more nicer than I expected when it comes to viewing.  On the streaming side, until both PS4 and Xbox One have YouTube Gaming integrated, streaming is going to be limited to desktop games or those who already stream console games using something like an Elgato (the big market though is console game streaming).

Update: the mobile app is really nice and offers a far better user experience than Twitch.  Again, the chat functionality looks and feels clunky but everything else is a major improvement over Twitch since it leverages on what Google does best when it comes to search as well as YouTube’s video on demand aspects.

This kind of arrogant inaction reminds me of Microsoft’s ex-CEO (Steve Ballmer) reaction and response to Apple’s original announcement of the iPhone and subsequently missing the boat on the mobile revolution (and setting the entire company back by at least 5 years in that space).

And then his response to the iPad which even he himself said they were some form of “PC” which in the years following to date, have sold well over 230 million units (while general purpose PC’s continue to decline in year over year unit sales as more and more find devices like iPad’s fulfilling those exact general purpose needs).

It was inevitable that the biggest video sharing site would enter the game streaming arena.  Google was of course at one time being the rumored buyer of Twitch.  That turned off many Twitch users because Google has a pretty lengthy history of turning acquired properties into marginalized initiatives (only a few of those acquisitions have turned into big but important ones like Google Maps, Google Earth, Android, to name the biggest ones) due to a lack of focus.

And there have been cases where Google has tried to re-invent the wheel, and never really quite hit the mark where those projects ended in its graveyard.  That included many social networking initiatives including Orkut and Buzz.  Google+ was yet another stab at a social networking platform meant to compete with the likes of Facebook (the company later in more of a PR move, stated that it more of an initiative to bring all their disparate properties and branding under one name).

Recently, Google has stated Google+ will be undergoing a shifting focus.  Two of the services core functions has been moved off into standalone products; Google Hangouts and Google Photos.  And even more recently, they have removed the Google+ link to user profiles from most of their properties (moving it to another but less visible link).  Basically, the public has by their actions indicated they are more than satisfied with Facebook and Twitter (using those properties for what they are good at doing).  Google doesn’t quite get social networking and this shifting focus signifies that while Google+ isn’t quite dead, that they have decided to move away (again) from trying to capture and always hang on to these users from those other services.

The point is that there are just some things that Google is not good at doing compared to other companies. YouTube’s forte is video though and game streaming is almost a no brainer.  Given the huge amount of video-on-demand (VOD) gaming content on the site, becoming a game streaming platform just makes sense.   Twitch by comparison amounts to a very specific niche and its purchase by Amazon hasn’t really yielded much noticeable results in terms of user facing improvements.  Basic things like chat remains problematic.  And the company (before the Amazon acquisition), made a major change to archival of prior broadcasts.  Twitch does provide a means to export video to YouTube but its another step that needs to be user initiated.  On the backend, its also a bandwidth consuming process for Twitch.

Furthermore, search on Twitch is horribly broken due to that change.  It brings up a lot of results but most of those results are invalid because they link to cached data that is no longer valid since the actual archived video no longer exists.  It’s a terrible user experience and one they haven’t even bothered to fix.  Contrast this to Google where search is their expertise.  Search on YouTube is likewise mostly a non-issue.

Following games are also an issue if it isn’t one of the major ones.  Since I’ve recently been talking about a Japanese RPG called Natsuiro High, let me use that as an example.  This link is it’s Twitch game directory (this is what is set automatically by the PS4).  Try hitting the follow button and then reloading the URL again.  The follow doesn’t stick.  It’s the same for many lesser known or very niche titles.

Twitch has only recently began rolling out archived VOD changes that will eventually allow all broadcasters to have past broadcasts that can be played back on mobile devices via the Twitch app.  Right now, they are rolling out those changes with partner streamers being the first to get this implemented.  But it’s a slow change and in light of this announcement by YouTube, Twitch will need to up their game big time.

The other more glaring one is streamer promotion; it is basically difficult for newer and smaller streamers to get noticed on Twitch due to the way streamers are promoted on the site.  There are are some mechanisms like hosting (that allows any broadcaster to host another; thus a large streamer can host a smaller one and give them a potential larger audience to get noticed).  Search (a weak spot for Twitch) for live streams also doesn’t help when both the web site and app have misses in their results.

YouTube is already the place that players use for sharing their gaming videos.  Their entire site is already mobile friendly including video playback.  That aspect will be tightly integrated and simplified with the streaming platform.  Twitch in the mean time has a setup that #1, needs to be specifically enabled (archive past broadcasts) and those broadcasts are only temporarily stored (for non paying users) for several weeks before they are automatically removed unless the player manually highlights that video.  And when it comes to highlighting, it’s a very rudimentary process.  This leads me to point #2; YouTube by comparison has had video editing tools for basic editing.

I personally do not stream myself but I am an occasional viewer and find that Twitch has way too many technical problems on the user facing end.  When searching their support site, some of those issues have been outstanding for years.  Similar to YouTube’s contentID system (for automated copyright flagging), Twitch also mutes portions of archived broadcasts that has suspected/matching audio of copyrighted content).  The problem is with false-positives and Twitch’s slow response to streamer inquiries.  To date, Twitch doesn’t do this to live streams (when technically, they are supposed to since if they found copyright violations in an archived stream, that meant it was also being streamed live).

My point is this competition is going to be a good thing for everyone because Twitch will need to fix these problems a lot quicker than the glacial pace they’ve been progressing at.  The Amazon acquisition (nearly an year ago) should’ve increased that progress since financial resources wouldn’t have been as big an issue.  Twitch has the early advantage including the community related aspects.  The thing is that for newer and smaller broadcasters, YouTube Gaming will offer a very strong and powerful alternative where they can make a name for themselves and have every tool necessary right at their disposal.  For the biggest Twitch streamers, some crossover will initially exist (broadcasting time split on the platforms to see which ones their community prefers unless they have a non-compete clause and Twitch turns the other cheek).  What may be a turning factor (and maybe not) for some is the partner incentives/monetization system that will be offered by YouTube.

Twitch’s partner program has had the luxury of being very selective to where even streamers who meet the newer relaxed requirements, are literally given the runaround (essentially amounting to a “don’t call us, we’ll call you if we really need to”).  They’ve also been inconsistent regarding enforcing their ToS and contractual agreements; offering leeway to some of their biggest streamers (some of them likely have tailored personal contracts – and as usual, this information is forbidden from being disclosed so lot of these stories usually come from those who have had their partnership revoked).  These are the folks YouTube Gaming has a chance to cater to though.

And what about Hitbox.tv?  I doubt they will be affected drastically by this as they have their own smaller niche and communities (some who were banned or made the decision to move off from Twitch).  Sure, some of those users may move to YouTube Gaming but Hitbox will remain their backup.   Ustream.tv is more than just gaming so they too aren’t going to be affected by this.  Twitch being the current leader, has the most to lose (and they have lot of issues to fix before this big competitor launches).

Publicly, Twitch isn’t blinking and rightfully so.  But internally, they should be concerned about just some of the few things I (and many others) have noted.  Again, some of these are longstanding and were reported on their community site (effectively being ignored).  Most everyone uses YouTube.  Not everyone uses or even knows what Twitch is.  Myself, I am not even a huge Google follower due to some of their own practices.  What I despise worse though are those who hold a near monopoly position in an area, and don’t bother addressing and fixing reported issues (since it sends out the signal that “we’re the only real game in town so it’s my way or the highway”).  That is a major reason why I am for this competition.