Video games have become a social norm. What was once a toy for “nerdy” children has become a pastime for people of all ages, genders, social statuses, and personalities.

The popularity of video games has expanded into every market imaginable, and few have felt the shift as much as YouTube.

YouTube has become a paradise for anyone interested in any genre of gaming. Walkthroughs, tutorials, commentaries, reviews, trailers, gaming related news, and all other types of gaming videos have covered the site. At 23.3 million subscribers, PewDiePie, a swedish gaming channel, is the most subscribed channel across the entire site.

However, YouTube is facing serious criticism from many of its popular gaming channels, criticism backed by threats of abandoning the site.

In recent years, YouTube content creators have been able to earn a solid living from ad revenue on their YouTube videos, in fact, some creators have become extremely wealthy, making millions from the popularity of their videos.

Video views, especially in the category of gaming, have shifted dramatically to mobile platforms. In 2012, YouTube analytics showed that one out of every three gaming video views came from a mobile device.

This doesn’t seem to be a problem until it is learned that YouTube takes all ad revenue from mobile views. YouTube takes 100% of the larger and faster growing platform’s revenue, which makes creating video content an increasingly difficult market to survive in.

While this problem is shared by all genres of content creators, no category has felt the effects of recent YouTube changes nearly as much as gaming.

In an effort to reduce the problem of copyright infringement in YouTube videos, the site has begun rolling out new systems to combat the problems.

The new automated content identification system has faced an outpouring of public dissent, and planned changes are largely thought to further damage the viability of being a full-time YouTuber. Even some of the companies that produce the games played on YouTube(many of which have previously had their own copyright battles with gaming content producers) have publicly voiced their opposition to the changes in support of the producers who help support and advertise their game.

Gaming video creators have begun to migrate away from the increasingly frustrating YouTube with the destination of Twitch.tv.

Twitch is a website based around hosting live streamed video game content. When it broke away as a subsidiary of Justi.tv in June of 2011, Twitch took the gaming community by storm.

In less than three years, Twitch generates the fourth highest amount of traffic of any company in the U.S. according to a study done by DeepField for The Wall Street Journal. With 45 million unique viewers each month, nearly one million unique broadcasters per month, and 12 billion(yeah, billion with a B) minutes of video watched per month(that’s 200 million hours, or 8.3 million days, or 22,831 years of video viewed every month), it’s pretty clear that content producers and content consumers alike prefer Twitch.

The live streams on Twitch are the perfect medium for the exponentially expanding world of eSports, they provide a more personal interaction between the the broadcaster and his or her viewers, and they present ideas that could never happen on sites like YouTube.

Recently, an anonymous broadcaster took advantage of Twitch’s unique characteristics in order to perform a social experiment. “Twitch Plays Pokemon” is a live stream of the classic 1996 Nintendo game Pokemon: Red Version, but with a twist. The viewers input the controls by typing a command into the chat. A program then takes each command and translates them into the game.

The program has two modes(the viewers can vote to switch between them), anarchy and democracy. Democracy mode inputs the most popular command over a 20 second period, and anarchy mode inputs each chat command directly into the game.

After a week of being live, the stream has peaked at about 120,000 viewers at one time, with 18.2 million views overall. Despite the chaotic appearance, the viewers have somehow managed to advance about half way through the game so far.

Random, chaotic, and shocking ideas like Twitch Plays Pokemon are part of the reason Twitch has become so successful, and likewise, Twitch’s popularity and characteristics are the reasons such unprecedented experiments are successful.

Gaming is still growing on YouTube, but Twitch’s exclusively gaming related content is exploding. According to the millions of viewers and broadcasters on Twitch, YouTube has sabotaged its own monopolistic growth, and Twitch’s superior experience will define the future of gaming videos.