YouTube have announced that they will enter the live streaming arena this summer with YouTube Gaming. The announcement states :
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.
The blog post also states :
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.
So this site will have over 25,000 titles, will allow live streaming, but will it allow Second Life? Before people say “Second Life is not a game“, pause to see how Second Life content is currently categorised on YouTube.
There are many Second Life videos on YouTube, but a good place to start is with the official Second Life YouTube Page. There Linden Lab have uploaded many videos and if you check out the more information part on a video listing you are likely to see something like this :
Category : Gaming
Licence : Standard YouTube Licence
Draxtor Despres also uses the Gaming category for his The Drax Files : World Makers series.
Now the Gaming category is largely used for Second Life videos on YouTube because it’s the only category that seems to fit. YouTube does not have a virtual world category. So if YouTube are selecting over 25,000 games based on what’s in the Gaming category, then it may well be that Second Life will be included.
However of course, it may be that YouTube decide that Second Life is not a game and therefore, it’s not a suitable fit. Time will tell. However moving forward, if the virtual reality boom does happen and virtual worlds do grow, then surely at some point they will be included.
YouTube Gaming is due to launch this summer, initially only in the US and UK.