YouTube Gaming Or Something Like It

I don’t stream a lot but I like YouTube Gaming so far. Twitch is okay, and Hitbox is okay, but I almost always see a lot of stuttering, lag, and painful dropouts, both when I stream and when I watch other streams. With YouTube Gaming I’m just going to go out on a limb here and guess that they’re going to have the best possible video streaming technology working behind the scenes. I had no difficulty uploading at 60fps, 1080p, 9000kbps. I could never get Twitch to work higher than 720p and around 3500kbps.

(I don’t exactly know how I got YouTube Gaming… as of this writing, it still says “coming soon” on the landing page. I guess it’s one of those open beta kind of things that anyone can get into. I can assure you I did nothing special to activate it. I think I might have clicked on the “get notified” button at some point, but I don’t remember. I don’t see any evidence that I received any emails. I think I just stumbled upon it on my regular YouTube video page.)

(Come to think of it, I may not even being using YouTube Gaming at all. But somehow I’m able to stream directly to YouTube which I don’t remember ever being able to do before.)

I’m probably alone in this opinion, but I love that you can turn off chat. I’m not a “hey let’s hang out together and chit-chat” kind of a streamer. I’m more of a “hey I’m playing a game, and I tend to talk to myself when I’m playing anyway, so you can watch if you want, but I’m trying to concentrate on what I’m doing, so I can’t monitor a chat and try to think of witty responses and also get off my damn lawn you hippies” kind of a streamer. On Twitch and Hitbox I believe you’re stuck with chat whether you want it or not.

One thing I don’t like, though, is the length of time it takes for archived streams to publish to your channel. On Twitch, it’s very fast, but with YouTube Gaming it takes basically the same amount of time that it would take to upload a recording from your desktop. That is, a long time. I don’t care so much about my viewers (ha!) but sometimes I want to replay something I did during a stream and I have to wait like a half hour.

If nothing else, it’s a handy way to store my videos on the YouTube servers instead of my hard drive. Videos take up a lot of space, yo.

This post was for Blaugust Day 4.