Remember a few years ago when YouTube started aggressively throwing money at some of Twitch’s golden-egg-laying-est geese, leading to widespread speculation that YouTube might supplant Twitch as the internet’s premiere livestreaming destination? That… didn’t happen. This week saw three big-name streamers – Ben “Dr Lupo” Lupo, Tim “TimTheTatman” Betar, and Kris "Swagg" Lamberson – return to Twitch after their lucrative YouTube exclusivity contracts expired. From here on out, the former two will stream on both Twitch and YouTube, while the latter is focusing on Twitch. The more things change, the more they stay the same. On this week’s Aftermath Hours, we talk about that.
We begin by marveling at the speed with which Sony pulled the plug on its latest live service offering, Concord, a game so focused-grouped for everyone that it ended up being for no one. Are live service games as a whole doomed? Probably not. But the way triple-A publishers approach them – toiling away for years and then releasing something that feels dated on day one – likely is.
Then we reflect on the great Twitch vs YouTube livestreaming war, which seems to be ending with a whimper rather than a bang. Now that Twitch allows creators to stream to multiple platforms and YouTube seems uninterested in significantly improving its streaming product, why not? In the end, nobody really won The Streaming Wars. Instead, they got distracted trying to copy TikTok.
Lastly, we discuss NaNoWriMo’s weird stance on AI, which – as with most supposed defenses of AI as a creative tool – just doesn’t really make much sense. Oh, and I absolutely knock it out of the park with my segment transitions this week. Do not believe anyone who tells you otherwise!
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can sink millions into doomed live service and platform exclusivity efforts (or at least into paying ourselves sustainable salaries).
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Nathan: [These streamers] are now streaming to Twitch and YouTube, which has become the new meta ever since Twitch started letting people do it last year. So we’re in this place where a few years ago, all the headlines were about the exclusivity wars between Twitch and YouTube. They were trying to lock down all the biggest names, and YouTube was making these big moves to try to become the new destination for livestreaming.
Here we are a few years later, and both have abandoned that strategy. YouTube really isn’t offering contracts like that to streamers anymore. Twitch still kind of does it in places, but not really. It’s interesting to see how things have changed, in part because the landscape shifted and now everyone’s on every platform. Even we’re doing that, to an extent. You post everywhere.
Chris: Technically you’ve been able to do that forever. You can stream to two different [platforms]. That’s not hard. It’s a very easy thing to do. The only thing preventing people was the money – and also moderating two different platforms.
Nathan: That’s the big issue.
Chris: Yeah, if you have two chats, that sucks.
Nathan: There have been debates this week between streamers about what to do now. Is the best approach to multi-stream because you’re allowed to and because you can maximize your audience’s size that way? Or is the strategy to focus on one streaming platform, because even beyond moderation, there’s also the issue of just engaging with an audience. It’s really hard to follow two chats at once. So if you want to engage with people – which is the point of livestreaming; the reason why it’s so popular is because there’s a back and forth – it doesn’t make sense to try to reach multiple audiences at once. Because at the end of the day, your YouTube audience or your Twitch audience or your Kick audience or whatever will have trouble talking to you.
Chris: I hope people aren’t prioritizing their Kick audiences.
Nathan: Yeah, but I had to include that because Kick does have a sizable audience for livestreaming at this point. I’d be remiss if I didn’t. But yeah, there are some people who say “Yeah, I’ve gotta be everywhere.” Ludwig, who’s one of the big remaining YouTube streamers, said that the next Kai Cenat isn’t going to come from multi-streaming. The next one of those is gonna be locked into a particular audience and culture. I don’t really have a take on this; I think that we’re going to have to wait and see what happens.
Chris: People are talking about how there are tools you can use to unify chat display. Not surprising. It still sucks to do, I think. I think that’s annoying. There’s a company called Topping that makes an audience interface. It’s a very funny name for a company. They just got into audio interfaces, and they have one out called the OTG model. You can plug a phone into it and plug it into a computer and have the same mic audio going into a livestream on a phone and your computer.
So if you’re doing the shit we’re talking about where you have a TikTok livestream and another stream going into Twitch, you can do both of those and have the audio feed into both. That’s one of those things where you’re like “Who is this for?” And then you hear people doing this meta with multiple streams, and you’re like “That’s who it’s for.” People who want to stream to, like, five different platforms.
Nathan: I think it’s still weird because the appeal of a chat is often the relationships within that chat. Even if you can address multiple groups, I think it still feels disjointed from a viewer perspective. Even if you see both chats at once via software, they’re not talking to each other. So you still end up in this odd spot.
Riley: I just want to make fun of the URL [for the company Chris mentioned], which is topping.pro, which I would click, but I would not expect to get what I’m told I’ll be getting.
Nathan: This is like every time I see a commercial for Dick’s Sporting Goods, and they tell me to visit dicks.com. I’m like “I don’t believe you! I don’t believe I’m going to get what you say I’m going to get from this website!”
But anyway, back to the topic at hand, I think it’s interesting where all of this has gone. For a minute there, it seemed like YouTube really cared about streamers and wanted to make that a big part of its offering. They had this guy named Ryan Wyatt who was running that side of things, and he was very hands-on, talking with streamers on Twitter all the time. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if what Dan Clancy, the current CEO of Twitch, is doing was inspired by Ryan being the head of a division but also this big-time community guy who was always making appearances, and everyone knew him by name. Being everyone’s cool friend.
But then what happened is, YouTube discovered something that Twitch has kind of known all along: Streaming is not an easy way for companies to make money. And around the same time, shorts got big. TikTok blew up. YouTube was trying to become a major player in the streaming space in 2020 and 2021, which is right around the time that TikTok really caught on. So YouTube was like “We’ve gotta pivot to rip that off.” In the years that followed, streaming just kind of stalled out for them.
They encountered the same problem that Twitch has in another way: Discoverability isn’t great on YouTube if all you’re doing is streaming. So streamers who weren’t already huge struggled there. And now we’re sort of back at square one, where streaming is a thing YouTube doesn’t seem to care about that much and Twitch is the main place to go for it. All these millions of dollars were slung around at streamers in the name of winning a war between two tech giants, and the end result is a status quo that’s not that different from what came before.
