YouTube itself has always had a strange relationship with gaming. Obviously gaming videos on YouTube are popular, but YouTube tries to push into gaming culture so hard you almost end up feeling bad for them.
For example, YouTube used to have a dedicated separate app for gaming, YouTube Gaming. This was shut down eventually as nobody used it, because why would you use a more limited version of YouTube? I suspect it was just a way to test UI changes before launching them.
Earlier this year YouTube launched Playables, cheap browser games that you can play directly on YouTube, desktop or mobile. I'm willing to bet these are all from Gamesnacks, an obscure product from Area 120, which is a part of Google that just launches a bunch of products and shuts them all down 3 years later. If you think it's weird to open YouTube to play games, just ask Netflix.
For some reason everything now needs to have their own version of Spotify Wrapped. It's fun to look back on the year, but I feel like we don't need a Yelp Year in Review. YouTube decided to make one of these, but only for gaming content.
If you open the YouTube app and go to the "You" tab, you will find a button to launch a recap of your gaming activity this year. Not much about anything else in the app, just gaming videos. If you're wondering, this is what mine said:
MY YouTube Gaming Recap 2024
- 4.4% of my watch time was gaming
- I watched videos about 9 different games this year
- The game I watched the most this year was Minecraft
- My top games of 2024 were
- Minecraft
- Wii Sports
- BeamNG.Drive
- Club Penguin
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- I jumped for the beef. I learned about the injustices of Parkour Civilization in evbo's epic series
- I watched gaming videos from 6 creators
- Evbo was my top gaming creator
- I was in the top 0.9% of BeamngShorts fans
- My top 5 gaming creators of 2024 were
- Evbo
- Bearman3600
- videogamedunkey
- Vargskelethor Joel
- BeamngShorts
- My gamer card is visionary. My creativity knows no bounds. I dive into projects with passion, turning empty spaces into thriving, imaginative worlds.
So if it's not obvious, I don't really watch gaming videos, I don't really care. I zoned out once while a BeamNG.Drive short was playing, and they made the top 5, so that says something.
Heading So You Know This Isn't The Same Section
Honestly, this is fun, but why didn't they just make this about activity for the whole platform? If you aren't a gamer, you have nothing to share. Why did they launch this one so early?
The whole thing is stupid, but also funny.