It's tough to say, honestly, and it depends on how you define "gamers". The initial batch was all about gaming, usually centered mainly around a community (initially a single game (since there weren't many streamers around) but later also broader categories like speedrunning and competitive gaming). That actually held on for some years. But as the audience grew and grew, they opened the gate for alternative content like "IRL" which really created an opening for people wanting to serve (or exploit if you will) gamers and their needs (they used to have a policy in place where only actual gaming streams were allowed and you could report non-gaming ones). That had already been the case previously where camgirls/former pornstars streamed themselves "playing" a game, fishing for donations and the like. However, they never really fought that and in the end, just embraced it since it meant more money for them (via subs, later also bits as well as more traffic in general). That's not a wrong decision as a company, but it left enough people with a bitter taste in their mouth.
One of the main issues is that you basically have no filters. You can't exclude entire categories, you can't exclude individual streams. They have no proper tag system and they got rid of communities. All of that makes it more difficult to find new streams that might be interesting to you specifically.
Then there is also the issue with performance. Twitch.tv isn't doing well in my browser and while I do have an "older" PC, other streaming websites don't have that issue. That and the fact that Twitch.tv is overloaded with pointless things I have no interst in ("new prime loot", despite having no such account, channel points which was mentioned elsewhere already, lots of notifications in the chatbox about who donated most, gifted most etc etc) basically forced me to watch Twitch.tv and chat with others (connecting to Twitch server via IRC client) outside of the website. It does work really well for channels you know you like but you will basically never discover new ones without going to the website.
Youtube is worse in general and I feel part of the issue is that they tried to bake the livestreams into Youtube proper. While it's not wrong to leverage existing platforms, it certainly wasn't good the way they did it. Also, due to the network effect as well as streamers being tied to one platform, competition isn't much of a thing anymore. As far as I can see it, the competition is long over and Twitch.tv won. The only real challengers were in the Justin.tv days when websites like Livestream and Ustream were actually larger and in the early Twitch era when own3d was still able to compete...until they ran out of money.
As for livestreaming platforms for people who are into gaming only? It's possible that one such thing can become relevant even with Twitch.tv around but for that to happen, Twitch.tv would have to be enormous...and even then, they would still offer a larger potential audience. Still, if that happens, the emerging platform might have more of the "pure" gamers around who stream for fun, rather than for money (one of the larger issues I have nowadays - lots of people streaming to make money, having overlays practically begging for it).
It depends on what year you are talking about. I still fondly remember the times when Justin.tv was full of illegal cough restreams of the Simpsons, Futurama etc. I even paid for a "pro account" to get preferred treatment when it came to data transfers aka I paid, so that the streams wouldn't lag (and yes, that was a thing back then).
That's pretty neat, I didn't know that. I have done it with some other stuff on the main website but never messed around with the chat before abandoning it for just using my IRC client to connect to it (has some advantages too like being able to scroll very far back, saving logs and the like but since they use a heavily hacked IRC server, it has disadvantages like not being able to see status messages (you won't be notified that a message you sent didn't arrive because the channel is in followers-only mode for instance)).
> One of the main issues is that you basically have no filters. You can't exclude entire categories, you can't exclude individual streams. They have no proper tag system
Are you talking about Twitch? Because it has all this? Or is it not good enough for your usecase?
> you know you like but you will basically never discover new ones without going to the website.
Mobile and Console-App are a good alternative. It's lacking some of the more noisy parts.
I did write "basically no filters" and "no proper tag systems". So while they do technically have those, they are very limited in function and completely useless for me. The few tags they have is worse than the community feature they got rid of and filtering is extremely limited. For instance, I would like to exclude several categories like: "Just Chatting", "League of Legends", "Slots" etc etc but I can't do that. There used to be a Firefox addon that allowed you to do it but it no longer works for me. As for tags, how am I supposed to find streamers that don't use a facecam (I'm not a fan of those) or streams where some tournament is going on (I'm a big fan of competitions, regardless of genre even)? Other livestreaming websites have the option of custom tags and those are really useful. The filters don't allow much. I can't select a number of languages instead of just one. It's not possible to define a range of viewers of a stream (between 5 and 100 for instance) which would be useful, especially with the exclusion of entire categories/games as that would make discovering something new and interesting a lot easier.
That's good to know, although I watch on desktop exclusively.
One of the main issues is that you basically have no filters. You can't exclude entire categories, you can't exclude individual streams. They have no proper tag system and they got rid of communities. All of that makes it more difficult to find new streams that might be interesting to you specifically. Then there is also the issue with performance. Twitch.tv isn't doing well in my browser and while I do have an "older" PC, other streaming websites don't have that issue. That and the fact that Twitch.tv is overloaded with pointless things I have no interst in ("new prime loot", despite having no such account, channel points which was mentioned elsewhere already, lots of notifications in the chatbox about who donated most, gifted most etc etc) basically forced me to watch Twitch.tv and chat with others (connecting to Twitch server via IRC client) outside of the website. It does work really well for channels you know you like but you will basically never discover new ones without going to the website.
Youtube is worse in general and I feel part of the issue is that they tried to bake the livestreams into Youtube proper. While it's not wrong to leverage existing platforms, it certainly wasn't good the way they did it. Also, due to the network effect as well as streamers being tied to one platform, competition isn't much of a thing anymore. As far as I can see it, the competition is long over and Twitch.tv won. The only real challengers were in the Justin.tv days when websites like Livestream and Ustream were actually larger and in the early Twitch era when own3d was still able to compete...until they ran out of money. As for livestreaming platforms for people who are into gaming only? It's possible that one such thing can become relevant even with Twitch.tv around but for that to happen, Twitch.tv would have to be enormous...and even then, they would still offer a larger potential audience. Still, if that happens, the emerging platform might have more of the "pure" gamers around who stream for fun, rather than for money (one of the larger issues I have nowadays - lots of people streaming to make money, having overlays practically begging for it).
It depends on what year you are talking about. I still fondly remember the times when Justin.tv was full of illegal cough restreams of the Simpsons, Futurama etc. I even paid for a "pro account" to get preferred treatment when it came to data transfers aka I paid, so that the streams wouldn't lag (and yes, that was a thing back then).