So Many YouTubes for Gamers…

(The battle for YouTube’s rattle.)
We know gamers are gutsy, competitive, and territorial. So it’s not surprising that games-only, user-posted video sites are now springing up in attempted defiance of Father YouTube. Three new names in particular have niche-carving knives in hand: WeGame, Leet Tube and GameVee, or GeeVee.

WeGame has the most traffic and videos currently, with over 45,000 visitors in its first month and just at 55,000 in its second, after launching in January this year. Perhaps this is thanks to its young founder, 19 year-old Jared Kim, following in the footsteps of other barely-adult moguls such as Napster’sShawn Fanning or Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg. Or maybe it’s the similarity of the site’s domain to wegame.info, an already established flash game, photo- and video-sharing site. Either way, it’s not thanks to originality.

Both WeGame and Leet Tube have been called the “YouTube for Gamers,” and unfortunately, that moniker pretty much sums up all three sites. The main “watch” pages for WeGame and Leet Tube are nearly identical, with GeeVee’s gaining a few points for color and image variation, though not innovation (but they do have “browse” instead of “watch,” clever). All three sites target and primarily attract the FPS crowd, who share their “awesome” (this word returns over 400 results in a GeeVee search) kills and skills to any player willing to click. There are humorous and artistic videos as well, such as the ongoing Chronicle of the Annoying Quest (its latest episode was the 22^nd of the series) or the (interesting?) Half Life 2 cartoon. And some players develop their video captures into complete stories and miniature films. But the games featured follow a similar pattern on all the sites: Halo, WoW, Half Life—popular, with dedicated fan bases, yes, but repetitive in video form and not the extra ’spice’ needed to vault one site to monster status.
If YouTube, which accepts and handles every type of video publishable on the web, can maintain dominance over other video sharing sites, do we really need three nearly interchangeable gaming locales? Each has their own ’special feature,’ hoping to stand out from the apparently now large game video crowd: WeGame’s free recording software, GeeVee’s “Highlight” feature, and Leet Tube’s…well, Leet Tube sounds the closest to YouTube, so that’s probably a plus. But without an obvious reason for gamers to choose one over the other, the crowd will split evenly and all three (and others not featured here) will end up relinquishing fragging rights to YouTube.

The one gaming video site which has that little extra something is the Speed Demos Archive. Speed runs are few and far between on the other sites, already giving SDA a leg up. It also offers a wider variety of games and platforms: while PC games are the driving force on the first three sites (albeit due to ease of recording), SDA has large quantities of console in addition to PC games. It does lack variety of video type (all are speed runs, no movies, comedies, or headshots), but that may actually be more profitable in the long run. Gamers and viewers can go to YouTube or for endless variety and random findings.A site like SDA immediately satisfies a specific desire. Maybe GeeVee or Leet Tube should choose a specific game or platform, and then be “THE source for (Halo! WoW! Xbox!) videos.”

Don’t set up a Target right next to Wal-Mart: build a RadioShack instead.