YouTube Gaming App Sucks (And Here's Why)

Imagine not hearing any sound coming from the game while streaming. That's YouTube Gaming app.

I never liked the idea of live streaming mobile games. Partly because the logistics behind getting the stream working and functional were too complicated, and partly the fact that I wasn't interested in seeing a face-cam placed awkwardly underneath the inevitably overweight twelve year old kids nostrils during a Minecraft walkthrough.

That being said, and the current landscape of Android gaming being the spam laden micro transaction Ponzi scheme that it is, I couldn't help but try to make it work myself, using YouTube's Gaming app.

In case you've been living under a bomb shelter in a parallel universe, YouTube Gaming was a platform aiming to rip off Twitch.tv, with some of YouTube's own UI and video functions thrown in there, just to remind you of how much of a pointless re-skin this website really is, and if the Android port of YouTube's Gaming app is any indication, this whole platform is about as useful to mobile gaming as polio is to a fucking firefighter.

Opening the app for the first time clues you in on the kind of innovative ideas present during the development of this app, when you notice how it's obviously just YouTube with a darker theme, and only shows gaming related videos. It doesn't quite become a pile of shit on the corpse of a dead elephant in my mind until I realized that my stream looked like this:

By the way, that was the UNEDITED full recording of the stream, from start to finish. No, you didn't just have a stroke, that was the entire stream. Now after watching that clip, if you weren't expecting a phone call telling you that you would die in 7 days, you were probably wondering why the stream looked less like gameplay footage and more like a PowerPoint presentation. You see, streams on YouTube and elsewhere have the ability to skip parts of the video where the connection cuts off or lags.

What you just saw was a clip of footage a little over 5 minutes long, but since YouTube doesn't record lag, ended up getting chopped and cut like it was the intro to a mid 90's NuMetal soundtrack.

It doesn't take a molecular physicist to know that compared to most gaming streams involving a console or a gaming PC, this looks about as stable as the dead wife of the protagonist of the P.T. demo trying to walk down a flight of stairs.

And no, it wasn't the stream quality, because I tried the same shit using both the 1080p and 480p stream options, and they are both the fucking same when they get uploaded by YouTube after the stream ends.

And before you even say it this was attempted on at least 3 devices, two of which are Motorola phones, and one of them was a Nexus.

It's entirely possible that this type of game casting is only compatible with a handful of devices thus far, making the foray into live Streaming with the app unreliable and a freaking gamble to say the least.

I dunno.