This summer, we’ll launch YouTube Gaming, a brand new app and website to keep you connected to the games, players, and culture that matter to you, with videos, live streams, and the biggest community of gamers on the web–all in one place.
YouTube Gaming is built to be all about your favorite games and gamers, with more videos than anywhere else. From “Asteroids” to “Zelda,” more than 25,000 games will each have their own page, a single place for all the best videos and live streams about that title. You’ll also find channels from a wide array of game publishers and YouTube creators.
Keeping up with these games and channels is now super easy, too. Add a game to your collection for quick access whenever you want to check up on the latest videos. Subscribe to a channel, and you’ll get a notification as soon as they start a live stream. Uncover new favorites with recommendations based on the games and channels you love. And when you want something specific, you can search with confidence, knowing that typing “call” will show you “Call of Duty” and not “Call Me Maybe.”
Live streams bring the gaming community closer together, so we’ve put them front-and-center on the YouTube Gaming homepage. And in the coming weeks, we’ll launch an improved live experience that makes it simpler to broadcast your gameplay to YouTube. On top of existing features like high frame rate streaming at 60fps, DVR, and automatically converting your stream into a YouTube video, we’re redesigning our system so that you no longer need to schedule a live event ahead of time. We’re also creating single link you can share for all your streams.
A sub-site specific to games with custom search isn’t going to solve everything wrong with using YouTube for game streaming and pre-recorded videos but the other changes are very important. Scheduling a live event ahead of time makes sense for developers and publishers live streaming but doesn’t always work for people like me who would rather build up an audience of subscribers who get notified when I go live.
The most important change YouTube could make is to recognize that I’m in a game and more intelligently handle copyright notices. Video games are full of copyrighted music, and without legal advisement it is difficult to navigate YouTube’s current copyright notice system. To be fair, YouTube is more intelligently handling that problem than Twitch’s policy of just muting the audio for the portion of the video where the copyrighted music is present. I’m still terrified that my YouTube account will get shut down if I dispute the copyright notices with a claim of fair use, which is the only way to get some videos to be viewable again in the United States.
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