Dailymotion launches live-streaming gaming platform to compete with Twitch
Chris O'Brien / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
Dailymotion is the first of a wave of challengers to go after Twitch's grip on live-streamed gaming, betting that a dedicated gaming vertical can pull viewers and creators off the category leader.
It will not stay alone for long: within months Google sources describe plans for a gaming-focused relaunch of YouTube's live streaming service, which becomes YouTube Gaming on iOS, Android, and web by August — with Mobcrush targeting mobile and Facebook's fb.gg portal arriving by 2018.
First-order effects
- Streamers gain a second live destination beyond Twitch from day one, splitting audience attention in the category Twitch had largely owned.
- Dailymotion commits engineering and content-acquisition resources to a vertical where it starts with no incumbent creator base.
Second-order effects
- Google accelerates its own response: the sourced plan for a gaming-focused live relaunch hardens into YouTube Gaming's summer US-UK launch, turning Dailymotion's opening move into a two-front fight against Amazon-owned Twitch.
- Mobcrush carves out the mobile-games niche that generalist challengers leave underserved, fragmenting the challenger side rather than consolidating it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, every major platform treats gaming video as a mandatory owned-and-operated vertical rather than a feature — Facebook's path from the Games SDK embedding livestreaming into PC games to a dedicated fb.gg portal is the template.
- Competition shifts from whether a platform offers live gaming to whose monetization tools retain emerging creators, since each successive entrant (Facebook's Level Up included) leads with creator economics.
The trend: Live game streaming is being repositioned from Twitch's franchise into a table-stakes vertical that every major media platform builds its own dedicated product around.