- very niche, their intended content would only be a small fraction of what yt gaming will offer (it focuses on live streams)
- very unattractive, since learning how to play the game by exploring it is the fun of it
- very unmonetizable, given that people can get the very same content, for free, in a format that's much easier to digest
I don't think they needed to invoke google to throw in the gauntlet.
> very unattractive. Your complaint is extremely subjective and evidently false for tons of people considering the brisk business game guide companies have done for decades and that streamers do on twitch and youtube today.
> very monetizeable. Yes.
Possibly, but please consider this: Game guides and gamefaqs.com contain reference works wherein one can go and look up details when one is stuck. One doesn't usually read the whole thing to learn how to play the game in the most efficient way (unless it's competitive or has complexity on the level of a programming language, like Minecraft).
> streamers do on twitch and youtube today
I'm unaware of twitch streamers or youtubers who primarily teach how to play a game. Can you point out examples of those? I'm really curious.
1) Walkthroughs are absolutely not the only type of guide that GameFAQs houses. It has never been only walkthroughs, even from its very early beginnings. The easiest example of this is Fighting games, which will have in-depth strategy and gameplay guides made specifically for each player.
2) GameFAQs has had a forum for ages, which also has this as the primary topic of discussion. It was in fact the first forum that I ever participated in as a young child, along with some #IRC channels.
> I'm unaware of twitch streamers or youtubers who primarily teach how to play a game. Can you point out examples of those? I'm really curious.
You're being facetious. Do you not know how to Google as well? I'm really serious. :edit:In the offchance you aren't feigning ignorance[0]
Picking three random games off the top of my head
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvEIxIeBRKSjprrvlbAcb...
- https://www.youtube.com/user/foxdropLoL/featured
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fbmd4eRNwnE
I did not pick any pure let's play-ers, even though those video/streams can be quite informative and serve a basically identical purpose to the Prima guides of yesteryear.
"Our forecasts had us profitable as of summer, 2016, and closing our second year with nearly $1.2-million in revenue."
Those were forecasts, not actual revenue.
For niche products, small companies are often in a surprisingly good position to compete with Google (or pretty much any giant company).
Advantages small companies have:
* Much easier to change feature/function/benefit and packaging to adapt to the market
* Not competing with revenue from 1000 other internal projects for staffing
* Similarly: can sustain a business with tiny beachhead markets that Google can't waste time capturing
It seems like people immediately realize that Google can own tiny markets (obviously, if you can own the whole market, you should be able to capture any subset of it), but don't realize that in practice Google won't capture small niches, because it's irrational for them to deploy engineers to earn $10 when those same engineers can be deployed to earn $100 somewhere else.
Also: just because you have all the resources of Google doesn't mean you're going to stick the landing on every project you start. On niche products, it's not only possible but actually kind of likely that you can out-execute Google.
That doesn't make live gaming videos a great new startup idea. Just be careful of the logic that says "Google entered a space and so now it's dead".
I was in Microsoft, part of an org which pulled in billions of dollars in double digits annually. When doing planning and visioning exercise, time and again we would never focus on scenarios which seemed to be ‘trivial’ (translating to hundreds of millions dollar revenue oppurtunity), as we had limited headcount and finite amount of time to execute.
Startups don’t realize how constrained are the product teams in big organizations, much more than many startups. Every headcount, every contract worker (if they are allowed at all) need to be fought for. And then there is bureaucracy - post planning and spec’ing it is impossible to do any sort of minor pivot, once the juggernaut starts rolling there is no stopping, no room for even a pause to evaluate a new threat.
I’m not an expert of gaming by any stretch and I’m sure the founders decided on best course of actions based upon their priorities but looking at the YouTube Gaming page (http://youtube-global.blogspot.in/2015/06/a-youtube-built-fo...), YouTube seem to be aiming for something which is natural extension of what was already happening in YouTube: “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.”
I thought the founders were right when they said YouTube Gaming launch is a validation. I’m sure in the initial days YouTube Gaming org would be taking small steps and would try to consolidate what is already happening in YouTube but perhaps in a disjointed fashion. Go for easy discoverability etc.
In this situation I would assume that there would be plenty of scenarios left uncovered which an innovative startup can solve for (which initially YouTube Gaming would be incapable of paying attention to due to resource constraints - people, time - however compelling they may be).
And hey, one could always build something with acquisition in mind - an acquisition by Google (YouTube gaming) wouldn’t have been a bad way to get validated in the end.
I have heard several times how actually having some competition helps companies quite often. It's not automatically the end if someone else has a similar offering.
Anyway, rather than just whining uselessly here I'm going to actually find his contact info and give him some suggestions.
If YouTube was going to be YouTube of gaming, then OP could have been Vimeo of gaming. I mean seriously, if Vimeo could be a profitable enterprise with a free, good enough YouTube, then so could them.
I'm not sure about other people, but events like these are usually more telling of myself than the deterrent. Almost every idea would have extreme challenges on the way. If I was the OP I would conclude that Google brought out my own insecurity about the product to surface. Nobody gives up on the castle they want to live in.
EDIT: The irony here is that he seems to have forgotten how YouTube was successful despite Google Video.
You learned everything about building a startup except building a profitable, sustainable business. Everything else is secondary.
His analogy of participating in a "boss fight" is flawed since it sounds more like they just turned off the game system as soon as a hint of the boss monster's first tentacle even appeared on the screen.
They assume that funding was in the bag already, that the product would get built on time (or at all) and that even 1 person would sign up. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't.
They were right about one thing though, the timing was fortunate that it was squashed just a little past the idea stage.
Now, this guy has a great principle on the tech giants being a threat for a competitive, efficient economy, but I'm just not with him on this one. His only marketable niche would be to get the top paid gaming professionals (like the Dota 2 team that won $6million this month), and provide a market place for the top talent to coach, but he didn't see that, and it's a very small niche to begin with.
A business is not just "people want X." It has to at least fit the "ENOUGH people want X and are willing to pay for it or are valuable enough as users in order to be sold to advertisers." The morality of that can be debated to death and isn't very interesting, but the reality of it is something we seem to miss a lot.
Honestly, this sounds just like a feature that this company may have made interesting with G will just kill off in a few years.
Reminds me of MS product announcements in the bad old days.
Selling below cost price is considered anti-competitive, and is illegal in many countries.
Google didn't kill their startup, their own naivity did.
Turns out is was mostly smoke and mirrors, and Blizzard made an exceptional game because of it.
http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/starcraft-orcs-in-space-go-d...
Hopefully for the sake of FastMail, Rackspace, et al, Google never tries their hand at email...
If I want to learn how to program, there are a TONS and I mean TONS of free resources everywhere on the internet - very similar to all of the game faqs people keep referencing. And yet, Lydia still makes a ton of money because their service is sold as a subscription based service which is much better than other resources on the internet.
If you do a good job of marketing this and sell it as a premium service, I'm sure they would've done just fine. Also, if they do make a dent in Google's service, you can bet their ass, they'd be calling about acquiring them in short order, which would have made a nice payday for them
Instead, they bailed at the first opportunity. To me, it doesn't sound like their hearts were really in it.
You want to monetize video content? Guess what the best platform to do that is? YouTube.
I don't know why you would even consider building your own competing platform when YouTube is right there waiting and offers everything you need. There are countless examples of strong businesses that have grown out of publishing YouTube video content.
If you really believe there is a niche for the content, then this development hasn't changed that at all. If anything it just pivots you away from the silly idea of building a platform, toward the real value of the offering.
I realize it's not as 'sexy' just to publish YouTube videos, but it's a far more sensible approach.
