Gaming in India is a growing market that has prospective investors excited. As the second most populous country in the world, the Indian gaming market is on track to grow 113 percent with expected revenues of $3.91 billion by 2025.
While still an overwhelmingly mobile focused market, with nine percent of people playing on PCs and four percent preferring consoles, the avenues for content creators have never been higher.
Specifically, YouTube has emerged as a standout platform for budding creators to flex their gaming skills in front of an audience. Google recognises this and has offered various incentives for creators in India. It has also seen nearly 100 percent growth in the creator revenue stemming from India between February and May 2020.
This is partially due to YouTube investing in a bevy of monetization options for its creators like Merchandise, Channel Memberships, Super Chats and Super Stickers.
We sat down with some creators to get their views on how YouTube has helped them grow and what the company can do to help them even more.
Can Gaming related content in India make money?
The question to start the conversation seemed to be the most obvious, is it possible to make a steady stream of income making YouTube content?
"Yes, there's enough audience to maintain a steady flow of income," says Gagandeep Singh aka Sikhwarrior. He started his YouTube channel with content focused on PUBG before steadily diversifying his content and growing to more than 100,000 subscribers.
Sikhwarrior has over 100,000 subscribers that tune in to his channel
"YouTube has a lot of gamers now, it's all about how happy you are keeping your audience so that they become a member of your channel or send you donations," says Singh.
"In the past 2-3 years the audience base has grown a lot," agrees Ankkita C, who also started her channel with PUBG content. She is now nearing 250,000 subscribers on YouTube.
Ankkita is just shy of 250,000 subscribers on her channel
"You need to be an established creator to have a steady source of income, and even then it always feels like a risk," Ankkita adds.
"At start, you really have to hustle. It takes a while to build your base, get consistent viewership, and there are also times when the growth stops suddenly," says Shobith Rai aka TbOne. He started with streams of PUBG and CS: GO. His channel is now close to 150,000 subscribers.
TbOne has nearly achieved the 150,000 subscriber milestone on his channel
"It’s not about the size of the audience that matters in the decision making, because every creator has a different audience size and yet they take it up full time. But yes, it is possible to have a steady stream of income through Youtube revenue, and eventually, brand endorsements," added Rai.
YouTube vs Twitch: The game streaming wars
Twitch and YouTube have been the go to options for budding content creators to flood towards. While both platforms offer their own advantages, we wanted to find out from the creators themselves what made them choose YouTube over Twitch.
"I feel Youtube has a lot of potential as it comes pre-installed on every phone you'll buy," says Singh.
"Twitch is the more premium segment of live streaming. It had emerged as an exceptionally great streaming platform but discoverability is still less on twitch if you are a new streamer which makes it hard for people to start. While on Youtube it all depends upon how good your VOD content is for discoverability," Singh added but he does admit that Live Stream discoverability could be better on YouTube.
"I haven't really tried Twitch so I don't know. But I guess the difference is that it's easy to find what you're specifically looking for there," says Ankkita.
"Youtube has a LOT to offer and a LOT of people offering it so the competition seems tough," Ankkita added.
"Twitch was predominantly made for gaming, whereas Youtube was made for all sorts of video content. Twitch does provide a lot of additional tools & support for gamers & advertisers alike," comments Rai.
"But in India Youtube is still king, and is probably going to stay for a while," observes Rai.
One of the common complaints YouTube creators routinely talk about is the disproportionate ratio of viewers compared to the actual people that subscribe to the channel.
"That comes with YouTube's algorithm," confesses Singh.
"Live Streamers do not stand a chance to be considered by the YouTube algorithm itself. If you're just a Live Streamer and do not create VOD content at all then that is where you'll be stuck in YT forever. YT algorithm always works on trending topic/games you have to play/stream/create VOD's to grow at a good pace or even be considered by the algorithm," remarks Singh.
"There's a lot of reasons, a lot of people subscribe just to watch VODs, some subscribe for a specific game and won't watch other games, some don't get notified about anything on the channel," observes Ankkita.
"So they never show up till they check it themselves , and some just may not be interested anymore! I know I've subscribed to a lot of channels and barely keep up with 4-5," notes Ankkita.
"Disproportionate ratio of viewers vs subscribers will always exist because viewers keep switching between creator basis their mood & liking. The only way to combat that is to keep growing your own base and introducing new people to your content," mentions Rai.
The hardware needed for the job
We then quizzed the young creators on the setup that they used while streaming.
"I have a Colorful RTX 3080 paired with i7 9700k processor, 16 gigs of RAM and 2TB of SSD for storage. I run a Dual PC setup for smooth streaming experience without any hiccups and being able to run all the games at Ultra settings which doesn't effect my streaming quality," announces Singh.
"For the Dual PC setup I paired it with my Gaming Laptop which also has i7 16 gigs RAM and 1660 GPU which is enough to handle 2k quality stream. For Best quality video/audio for the viewers I use a Sony a6600 Mirrorless Camera as main cam & Shure SM7B paired with GoXLR for audio capture," he adds.
"I have a dual-monitor setup with an intel Core i9 9900kf processor, Colourful RTX 3060Ti GPU, 16GB of RAM and an Elgato stream deck," states Ankkita.
"At the heart of my gaming PC is the INNO3D GeForce RTX 3080 iCHILL X4 combined with a 12 Core - 24 Threads Processor along with 32GB DDR4 Memory clocked at 3600 MHz running in dual channel," says Rai.
"I use NVIDIA GeForce Experience to record gameplays and convert it into clips later. It also helps me keep my NVIDIA Game Ready drivers updated. My broadcast setup includes lights from Corsair Elgato, Elgato Streamdeck, Microphone from RODE along with NVIDIA Broadcast App to offer noise free streams," he adds.
The improvements creators want to see on YouTube
The conversation then shifted to the improvements that they wished to see on YouTube that could potentially help them grow their channels even further.
"Changes like more discoverability to Live Streamers, being able to download clips from your stream in Creator Studio, Ability to see who clipped what from your streams, Better transcoding at 1080p (60fps), Membership Gifting feature, Ability to do giveaways from the studio, Better moderation features & more," voices Singh.
"Well we wanted sub-only chat, clips, polls, and they gave us all of it," remarks Ankkita.
"But the most basic thing I'd like is for the platform to send out notifications to everyone when there's new content on time! There's so many viewers who have the bell icon on and still complain that they didn't know I was live or put out a new video," mentions Ankkita.
"Youtube should introduce some more advertising friendly tools for live-streaming creators, similar to Twitch," declares Rai.
Tips for beginners
We decided to end on perhaps the most important question of all, tips for beginners who are starting out on the platform.
"My tip for the beginners is, find out why do you want to be on Youtube. Do you like to entertain people or something else," posits Singh.
"Find out who you are and what type of content creator you want to be, you need to focus on one category and research on what is happening in that field, stay up to date, create content, keep your audience engaged and rest will follow," comments Singh.
"Be consistent! Be a person that people would want to look at, interesting, funny, happy, at least one of these! No one wants to have a hard day at work/college and come watch someone with a negative vibe," summarises Ankkita.
"Create your own niche, and keep introducing newer audiences to your niche. Also, keep doing cross platform promotion of your content to reach out to a wider audience. Keep experimenting with different formats of content like Shorts, livestream, integrated video, highlights, montages, etc," postulates Rai.
You can check out Sikhwarrior's channel here, Ankkita C's videos here and TbOne's gaming adventures here.
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