YouTube is continuing to take aim at Twitch in the fight for livestream viewers by announcing a few new features on its platform today.
Along with the expansion of its clipping tool, YouTube has officially introduced subscriber-only chats and polls for all streamers.
Testing for YouTube’s Clipping tool started in January with a limited number of creators. And now, any gaming creator with at least 1,000 subscribers has access to it.
Meanwhile, the sub-only chat feature, which was beta-tested beginning in May, is available to all streamers as well as the ability to create live polls on your stream for viewers.
On Twitch, all of these features have been available for quite some time. But YouTube’s move into the modern age of streaming comes with year-over-year growth for the platform’s game streaming in the past three years.
In H1 2021, YouTube Gaming racked up 2.7 billion hours watched, up from 2.1 billion in 2020 and 1.3 billion in 2019, according to statistics reported by Stream Hatchet.
This comes after numerous popular content creators, like Valkyrae, Dr Disrespect, and CouRage, made the move from Twitch to YouTube Gaming as their streaming platform of choice.
The platform’s figures still pale in comparison to Twitch’s 12.8 billion hours watched in the first half of 2021, but the consistent growth shows promise after another platform, Microsoft’s Mixer, shut down in 2020.
