YouTube Gaming’s Fwiz teases new features to compete with Twitch

Scott Robertson

The Head of YouTube Gaming, Ryan ‘Fwiz’ Wyatt, teased upcoming updates to their live streaming platform on Twitter, and some of them reflect features that are currently synonymous with its largest competitor, Twitch.

According to YouTube Gaming’s leader, the platform will soon be implementing a couple of the most popular features of its biggest challenger – Twitch.

After posting a promotional image for the opening weekend of Overwatch League, which is now to be exclusively streamed on YouTube, Fwiz was asked about in-game rewards for watching.

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He confirmed that the YouTube team is indeed working on it, and that it’s something that they really want for OWL fans. He gave no timetable for when fans should expect it, and also gave no indication of whether Call of Duty League would get similar treatment.

In seasons 1 and 2 of Overwatch League, during which they exclusively streamed on Twitch, players earned tokens from watching matches with a linked Blizzard account. Players could then use these tokens in-game to purchase League team hero skins.

It appears the tokens will return in some form when OWL switches over to YouTube, and Fwiz teased that viewership rewards won’t be the only thing coming over from Twitch.

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When a followup reply asked for clips to be made available as well, he shared a reaction gif of another Cleveland native living in Los Angeles, LeBron James, struggling to hold back a smile. This appears to be a subtle indication that clips could be making an appearance on YouTube too.

The clips feature is one of the biggest draws to the Twitch platform. Shareable clips allow for streamers to get views on their channel outside of their normal streaming hours. Mixer recently added clips, and only more recently added the ability for viewers to generate clips themselves.

While trying to draw traditional streamers away from Twitch is certainly going to be an uphill battle for YouTube, despite landing some big names like CouRage, Valkyrae, and LazarBeam. But they laid down the gauntlet in trying to take a portion of the esports viewership crowd early this year.

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In January, just hours before CDL launched, Blizzard and YouTube announced that professional Call of Duty and Overwatch would stream exclusively on YouTube. CDL Launch Weekend peaked at over 80k viewers on YouTube, during the Hunstmen-Empire opener.

Additions of both viewership rewards and clips could prove to be a major boost to YouTube’s campaign against Twitch.

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About The Author

Scott is a former esports writer for Dexerto, who covered a variety of esports games including, CS:GO, Valorant and League of Legends.