Clair Obscur: Expedition 33Suggested ReadingStreet Fighter 6’s Modern Controls Are Great For The Game Share SubtitlesOffEnglishview videoSuggested ReadingStreet Fighter 6’s Modern Controls Are Great For The Game Share SubtitlesOffEnglishYou unlock the camp…laterOne of the odd design decisions in Clair Obscur is that you will start getting items that can be used at “camp” before you actually unlock the ability to set one up. So if you pick up items to upgrade your weapons and you can’t figure out where to do that, it’s because you probably haven’t unlocked it yet. You can set up camp once you reach the overworld map that lets you travel between hubs. This will come a few hours into playing, and after you have a team of at least three characters.Free aim shots don’t end your turn, but use them wiselyEach character in Clair Obscur has a free aim ability that lets you aim and shoot projectiles at enemies in real-time. This is helpful for taking out flying enemies that will dodge your standard sword strikes, but it also doesn’t end your turn like an attack, ability, or item will. Your “ammo” is your AP, which fuels most of your abilities, so there is some risk vs. reward involved in just unloading bullets into your enemies. However, since they don’t end your turn, they’re a good tool to fall back on when an enemy has shields that will withstand several hits. If your enemy has shields up, they’ll reduce all incoming damage until a set number of attacks breaks them. These attacks don’t have to hit a certain damage threshold to break the shield, they just have to reach a certain number of strikes. So you can unload several bullets into an enemy to take down their shields, clearing the way for you to use more powerful attacks in the same turn.Pictos have stat buffs alongside their base effectOne of the most important tools in your arsenal is Pictos. These are equipment that give each character passive buffs and effects, but they’re often more complex than simple stat boosts. Some examples include giving you additional AP for each dodge or parry, letting a character go first in battle, or boosting your standard attack’s damage after a free aim shot. But on top of this, they do often still have stat boosts as well. You have a lot of control over your stats, as you upgrade them manually with each level. However, a good Picto with a buff can make up for not dumping points into one stat or the other. I gave Gustave a Picto that greatly increased his health, freeing me to dump points into strength, defense, and agility. So while the passive abilities that come with Pictos are the draw, keep an eye on their other benefits.Don’t rely just on dodging, especially against long combosClair Obscur’s turn-based battles are built around timing mechanics. There are QTEs to increase ability power, as well as dodge and parry mechanics to avoid and counter incoming attacks. For much of the early game, I relied on dodging more than parrying because the timing for those felt more forgiving. However, as I got further, I would run into enemies that would string together vicious combos that were so fast that by the time my character returned to their default position after dodging the first attack, the second one was already making contact. This is the kind of scenario in which you have to learn to parry with precision, and perfectly parrying enemy combos will allow you to throw some of that damage back at an enemy. You can mix both of them into your response, but if you commit to parrying, you’ll get the added benefit of countering.Make time to talk to your team at campSometimes you’ll be forced to set up camp for story reasons, but it’s worth heading to camp of your own volition just to check in on your party. As the game goes on, you’ll unlock social events to learn more about your crew, as well as optional scenes of the whole group reacting to the latest development. So make sure you head to camp to see how folks are holding up.Make sure your team has status effect abilities that you can build combos fromAlmost every ability in Clair Obscur has an additional reaction to something else. Sometimes an attack will get a passive buff if it’s used on an enemy afflicted with a status effect, or they’ll build off one of your character’s personal mechanics. Juggling all these combos and moving parts can be overwhelming, but when you get the hang of it, that’s when the game’s combat really shines. As you’re upgrading your team and assigning their abilities, look for combo opportunities even if the individual move might not seem that great on its own. I gave Gustave an ability that “marks” enemies for higher damage, despite it not really doing much beyond that. Maelle was then able to follow it up with an attack that would further increase damage to marked enemies, making it easy to reach the 9999 threshold with one attack. Gustave has an attack that self-heals when he strikes an enemy afflicted with burn, so I would have Lune unleash fire spells that would affect the whole enemy team right at the beginning of a match so he could leech off them. These combos are laid out pretty clearly in the battle UI, but there are so many different status effects and individual character mechanics that initially I would often stumble upon these interactions without realizing they were in my toolset. Once I started paying more attention to these, new strategies formed as I moved down the skill tree.Burn is your best friendSet your enemies on fire early and often. The Burn status effect deals decent damage at the beginning of every enemy turn. The effect stacks, so you can theoretically keep it going for an entire battle until the enemy is burnt to a crisp by reapplying fire spells and abilities before the status effect ends. This is especially useful when fighting fast enemies who get multiple turns in a row, as it will use their speed against them and deal more damage.Maelle is much more powerful than you thinkThe only piece of advice I will give you in terms of party composition is that Maelle, the rapier-wielding party member, should always be on your team. Homegirl’s stance-shifting kit allows her to pivot between stat distributions in the middle of a fight to prioritize attack or defense, and the trade-off for that flexibility is that her stance changes are tied to other abilities. For example, some attacks will automatically shift her to one stance or another, and that means moving into the desired one can sometimes require a few turns of setup. But once you lock her into the Virtuose Stance that doubles her attack power, you are set up to take out nearly any enemy with a flick of her wrist. Managing her stance shifting requires some forethought, and that can make her challenging to use and strategize around, but once you figure out how best to utilize her abilities, she will mow through the most powerful foes you’ll face in Clair Obscur.

In the State of Play series, we share in-depth interviews with featured industry experts at Unity events.In our first interview, we sat down with Samantha Benjamin, Director of Growth and LiveOps at Supersonic from Unity. At Appfest 2024, Samantha analyzed mobile gaming’s industry-wide shift from hyper-casual to hybrid-casual games. Here, she shares her insights into the trends that brought about the transition, what the shift means for both publishers and advertisers, and Supersonic’s approach to both defining and publishing hybrid-casual games.1. What is the current state of the hyper-casual market and how did we get here?The hyper-casual market has seen significant growth since its emergence around 2016. It was once a fast-growing genre, bringing in a huge number of new players and offering advertisers massive volumes of ad inventory. However, as of 2022-2023, it faces a decline in installs and market interest.This slowdown is attributed to factors such as post-COVID economic adjustments, rising user acquisition (UA) costs, and diminishing eCPMs. As advertisers face more competitive markets and declining returns, hyper-casual’s once-dominant position has been challenged. Despite these challenges, it still accounts for around a third of mobile gaming ad impressions, which shows its lasting importance as a supply source.2. How has hyper-casual contributed to the current state of the mobile gaming and app ecosystem?The hyper-casual genre played a pivotal role in bringing new players into the mobile gaming ecosystem. By offering easy-to-understand gameplay and high marketability, it effectively acted as a "funnel" for converting non-gamers into mobile gamers. Furthermore, hyper-casual helped expand the ad ecosystem by generating a massive volume of impressions that advertisers could buy. This expanded supply helped major gaming studios diversify their UA strategies, reaching users more effectively through ad-supported apps.3. As you mentioned, UA is highly competitive today. But eCPMs are still rising. What has contributed to this and what can we take from this trend?The rise in eCPMs is largely due to the maturing ad networks and improvements in their data science and optimization algorithms. As the mobile gaming industry faced challenges such as privacy restrictions and rising costs, networks focused on improving targeting precision, ad placements, and data analytics. This optimization has allowed for better monetization, even in a more competitive environment.For us, the key takeaway is that while UA costs are higher, we now have the tools and models to maximize revenue potential by making better use of the available inventory and targeting the right user segments more efficiently.4. How have the changes in CPI rates affected game publishers and studios?As CPI rates have risen, publishers and studios have been forced to adapt by increasing their focus on lifetime value (LTV) and retention. With higher UA costs, studios now need to ensure they can generate sufficient revenue from users over a longer period. This has led to greater adoption of hybrid monetization models and a focus on optimizing the user experience to improve engagement and monetization. And as a result a new mobile game genre has emerged, hybrid-casual.5. How does Supersonic define a hybrid-casual game?At Supersonic, we see hybrid-casual games as a combination of the mass appeal and marketability of hyper-casual games with the deeper, more engaging gameplay and content usually affiliated with casual games. Hybrid-casual games usually offer a balance between ad-based monetization (IAA) and in-app purchases (IAP), with IAP becoming a significant revenue stream.For us, a hybrid-casual game must appeal to a broad audience while also providing enough complexity to retain and monetize users long-term. It integrates mechanics and monetization strategies from both the hyper-casual and casual game genres.6. How does Supersonic evaluate the success of a hybrid-casual prototype in terms of both its UA and monetization?When evaluating a hybrid-casual game prototype, we focus on several key metrics:User Acquisition: Strong marketability and a good CPI-to-LTV ratio are critical. The game should have a broad appeal and show potential for scale.Monetization: We assess both IAP and IAA performance. The game should show healthy IAP conversion rates and a mix of monetization strategies (e.g., rewarded ads, interstitials, and in-app purchases).Engagement: Retention metrics (especially Day 7) and user engagement (e.g. session length, playtime) are key to assessing long-term potential.Balance: A successful prototype will offer a balanced monetization strategy, where ads and in-app purchases co-exist without cannibalizing each other."Hybrid-casual games represent the future of mobile gaming, providing publishers and studios with the ability to scale their games more sustainably."7. How long does it typically take to create a hybrid-casual game and what kind of resources are required?Typically, the development time for a hybrid-casual game is longer than a hyper-casual game - taking around 12-18 months from initial concept to launch, as the game requires more complex mechanics and content.Additionally, you also have to balance the game economy to effectively create pressure points to monetize users through IAP and ad offers. So, a strong development team is required to handle the core gameplay and complex monetization mechanics as well as balance the game’s economy.8. How does Supersonic optimize and iterate on hybrid-casual games?We apply a rigorous testing and iteration process for hybrid-casual games that includes constant A/B testing and retention and engagement optimization, particularly for Day 7 and beyond. We also employ creative iterations for UA and data-driven adjustments to improve monetization models.9. How do creative strategies differ for hybrid-casual games compared to hyper-casual?Creative strategies for hybrid-casual games are more complex and targeted than for hyper-casual games. For hybrid-casual games, we focus on deeper, more engaging gameplay in the ad creatives, that highlight both IAP and ad monetization opportunities and segment ads based on user behavior. 10. What will be the long-term impact of the hybrid-casual genre for publishers and studios?Hybrid-casual games represent the future of mobile gaming, providing publishers and studios with the ability to scale their games more sustainably. Over the long term, we expect more stable revenue generation due to a balanced monetization model, a lower volatility in user acquisition costs compared to hyper-casual games, and a higher quality of user. Hybrid-casual games will also encourage greater innovation in game development and monetization strategies.11. From an advertiser’s perspective, what does the continued rise and dominance of hybrid-casual games mean?For advertisers, the rise of hybrid-casual games is a positive development. It offers high-volume impressions from games with a broad appeal, while creating new avenues to reach higher-quality users who are more likely to make in-app purchases and engage with ads. Hybrid-casual games also provide longer engagement and more playable ad opportunities, especially with rewarded videos. These represent better monetization opportunities for advertisers and the ability to target a more diverse inventory which can help scale campaigns in a more sustainable way.

With over 10 million mobile downloads, Lihuhu’s Match Triple 3D sets the standard in the puzzle game genre - particularly for its winning monetization strategy.Lihuhu has a multifaceted growth strategy that has consistently included one key element: consulting with experts. Lihuhu has partnered with Unity’s Game Design & Revenue Consultancy, making data-informed tweaks to Match Triple’s 3D’s to optimize its monetization setup.Arjun Gohil, Senior Game Analytics Consultant, shares some of the most important ingredients to Match Triple 3D’s continued success. Let’s dive in.Match Triple 3D’s game strategy, in a nutshellLihuhu’s Match Triple 3D is a classic Match-3 game with a twist: not only are players matching items, they’re also tasked with cleaning up toys in a house. The game utilizes a simple core loop - players collect the toys in groups of three, then advance to the next level once the room is tidy.Match Triple 3D players are motivated by the satisfaction of making matches and cleaning each room. As levels grow more complex, players get to face new challenges and continually prove their matching skills.Monetization overviewTo monetize their players, Match Triple 3D uses a hybrid monetization model, featuring in-app purchases like coins and boosters, and ad formats like rewarded videos and interstitials.After completing each level, players receive in-game currency (coins), which they can use to purchase boosters. But as players progress to more challenging levels, they often need extra resources to advance. In Match Triple 3D, they have two options to get extra resources: make an in-app purchase or watch a rewarded video ad. This way, Lihuhu can monetize both their paying and non-paying players.Let’s get into the deeper breakdown, starting with Lihuhu’s ad placements and how they complement the core loop.Building a player-oriented ad strategyWhen it comes to monetizing any game, player engagement leads to profitability. By focusing on retention and creating a positive experience, players will naturally want to play - and revenue will naturally grow.To ensure players have a great in-game experience, ads should complement a game’s core loop. Here's how Lihuhu puts this into practice. Minimizing churn through player revivalMatch Triple 3D excels at offering ads exactly where you’d expect them: at the end of the core loop. For example, since puzzle games tend to have long levels, some players run out of lives before completing a level. To prevent any player churn, Lihuhu uses an essential placement: revival rewarded videos.Each and any time a player loses their lives in the game, they are presented with a simple offer: watch this ad to “revive” yourself and stay in the game. It’s a win-win - players don’t have to lose their hard-earned spots in the game, and Lihuhu can minimize churn.In fact, Lihuhu takes an extra step to maximize their revenue potential: If players want to continue playing the game but don’t want to watch an ad, they can spend 100 coins to skip it.Placing interstitials at player-friendly momentsWhile interstitials are key for a winning monetization strategy, they should be placed very carefully to maximize retention. Initially, Lihuhu placed interstitials very early in the Match Triple 3D experience, but this might cause players to think the game is very ad-heavy, and even lead to player dropout. But churned players might not need to be monetized through ads - perhaps some churned players will become payers at a later point in their game experience.To ensure a positive in-game experience and minimize dropout, we recommend not placing interstitials in the first week or two of the game experience. The ideal timing depends on the game genre - casual game developers can wait just a week to use interstitials, but RPG and simulation games tend to have longer onboarding periods, so those developers should wait a full two weeks.Demonstrating the benefits of in-app purchasesIn addition to ads, in-app purchases are an essential element of Match Triple 3D’s game experience. Let’s explore how Lihuhu maximizes revenue by familiarizing players with their in-app purchases: boosters.Offering a free booster experienceWhile using boosters is the fastest way to advance in Match Triple 3D, many players hesitate to pay for them. That’s why Lihuhu implemented an intuitive strategy - when they introduce players to boosters, they gift one free booster.Imagine that a player is struggling to finish a level, but they’ve received a free magnet booster that automatically makes 3 matches. This free booster can significantly accelerate the player’s progress, empowering them to continue playing the game and finish the level.According to our data, players who get to experience a booster are more likely to actually purchase a booster later on - especially if they run out of in-game currency. This ability to turn players into payers is a game changer for any monetization strategy.Signposting important and new featuresMobile games have a very broad audience, including people who don’t consistently play mobile games. That means developers should create a straightforward and intuitive onboarding experience. For example, to simplify Match Triple 3D’s onboarding, we suggested that new players skip the main menu and automatically get started with level one.We also recommend spoon-feeding, or signposting, each new feature to users - even if it requires pausing the game (e.g. “Drag this”, “Tap here”). To build an optimized monetization strategy, signposting is especially important for in-app purchases. After all, if players don’t have a clear understanding of how in-app purchases work, they aren’t as likely to make them.Shifting between easier and harder levelsWhen configuring their games, many developers tend to make their difficulty curve linear, so each level is slightly more challenging than the last. In theory, this is a great strategy, and one that Lihuhu has utilized in the past, but as each level becomes more challenging, developers are likely to see a dropoff in players. Why? A steep difficulty incline doesn’t necessarily feel rewarding, which creates a less positive player experience.That’s why we suggested that the difficulty of each Match Triple 3D level should vary. For example, instead of starting with four easy levels, then jumping to a difficult level five, we recommend a different setup - three easy levels, two harder levels, then another easier level. This way, the game progression isn’t predictable - players can continually experience the highs of completing levels and the excitement of facing new challenges.From a monetization perspective, we call these “sinks and sources.” During sinks, or harder levels, players are more inclined to watch an ad/make a purchase - then, during sources, or easier levels, players can quickly make up their currency. There should be a tug-of-war between sinks and sources, so developers like Lihuhu can keep the game engaging over time while also maximizing revenue.Note: The sinks and sources data was collected in the third quarter of 2023. Ultimately, by continually measuring, analyzing, and tweaking their monetization strategy with Unity's Game Design & Revenue Consultancy, Lihuhu’s Match Triple 3D exemplifies what it means to go beyond a standard monetization strategy, maximizing engagement and growth.

OpenAI on Wednesday brought the tech behind its new and improved image generation feature in ChatGPT to its API, allowing developers to integrate it into their apps and services. OpenAI’s new image generator, which launched for most ChatGPT users in late March, went viral for its ability to create realistic Ghibli-style photos and “AI action figures.” It’s been a mixed blessing for OpenAI, leading to millions of new signups for ChatGPT while also greatly straining the company’s capacity. Over 130 million ChatGPT users created more than 700 million images in just the first week of the tool’s availability, according to the company. In OpenAI’s API, the image generation capability is powered by an AI model called “gpt-image-1.” A natively multimodal model, gpt-image-1 can create images across different styles, follow custom guidelines, leverage world knowledge, and render text. Developers can generate multiple images at a time using gpt-image-1, and control the generation quality — and therefore speed. According to OpenAI, gpt-image-1 employs the same safety guardrails as image generation in ChatGPT, including safeguards that restrict the model from generating content that runs afoul of the company’s policies. Developers can control moderation sensitivity, which can be set to “auto” for standard filtering or “low” for less restrictive filtering. Low filtering limits fewer categories of potentially age-inappropriate content, per OpenAI documentation provided to TechCrunch. OpenAI also says that all images created with gpt-image-1 are watermarked with C2PA metadata so they can be identified as AI-generated by supported platforms and apps. Pricing is $5 per million input tokens for text and $10 per million input tokens for images, and $40 per million output tokens for images. (Tokens are the raw bits of data that the model processes.) That translates to around 2 cents, 7 cents, and 19 cents per generated image for low-, medium-, and high-quality square images, respectively, according to OpenAI. OpenAI says that companies including Adobe, Airtable, Wix, Instacart, GoDaddy, Canva, and Figma are already using or experimenting with gpt-image-1. Figma’s Figma Design platform, for example, now lets users generate and edit images via gpt-image-1, while Instacart is testing the model for images for recipes and shopping lists.

In Brief Posted: 8:52 AM PDT · April 23, 2025 Image Credits:Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images Google Gemini has 350M monthly users, reveals court hearing Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, had 350 million monthly active users around the globe as of March, according to internal data revealed in Google’s ongoing antitrust suit. The Information first reported the stat. Usage of Google’s AI offerings has exploded in the last year. Gemini had just 9 million daily active users in October 2024, but last month, the company reportedly logged 35 million daily active users, according to its data. Gemini still lags behind the industry’s most popular AI tools, however. Google estimates that ChatGPT had roughly 600 million monthly active users in March, according to the company’s data shown in court. That puts ChatGPT on a similar user base to Meta AI, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in September was nearing 500 million monthly users. Companies tend to measure MAUs slightly differently, but these numbers indicate just how widespread Gemini’s consumer adoption is. In the last year, Google has put Gemini in front of millions of users through AI integrations with Samsung phones, Google Workspace applications, and Chrome. Topics

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Looking back, the original idea behind YouTube seems almost quaint. The mythic founding story goes like this: in January of 2005, two PayPal employees, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, were at a party. People were taking photos and videos on their digital cameras. Sharing photos was easy, sharing video was anything but. “People have different video types, video codecs they have to download, video software,” Chen said on Charlie Rose in 2006. He and Hurley had a sense that as digital cameras and cameraphones became ubiquitous, more people were going to want to share their footage. “We tried to simplify the process, to make it as easy as possible to share these videos online.” By the end of the year, their simple platform was already a huge hit.Fast forward to today, the 20th anniversary of the first-ever YouTube video upload, and the numbers have become so big they’re basically meaningless. Three and a half billion people watch YouTube every month, according to one study. Google’s earnings show it brought in about $36 billion in ad revenue alone last year. YouTube gets 50 percent more viewership than Netflix, and about as much as Disney, Prime Video, Peacock, and Paramount Plus combined — and that only counts people watching YouTube on their TVs. YouTube is by most measurements the second most popular search engine on the internet (after Google), and the second most popular social network (after Facebook). It’s the most popular service for both music and podcast listening. It’s the second most popular page on Wikipedia, for some reason. It’s for cat videos and Oscar winners. YouTube knows no bounds.Ahead of the 20th anniversary, I talked to a number of people inside YouTube about the state of the platform. I asked them all a variant of the same question: what is YouTube? It’s not just a video-sharing platform anymore. It’s podcasts and videos and music and games and group chats and a thousand other things. What has YouTube become? And what’s the plan going forward?Over and over, I heard the same thing: YouTube is more complicated and more diffuse than ever, and it’s definitely no longer a singular platform. But the idea at the core of the thing hasn’t changed at all. “The secret of YouTube was never really a secret”“The secret of YouTube was never really a secret,” said Scott Silver, a product and engineering leader at YouTube who has been at Google since the days of Google Video. (Google Video, you definitely don’t need to remember, was Google’s attempt to build a video-sharing platform before it gave up and bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006.) “It’s just that if there’s a giant collection of videos somewhere, and you figure out which ones to show people, and then they watch them, and you’re able to pay the people who make that collection of videos to make more of them, then there’s more stuff to choose from. It compounds on itself.”That’s the grand unified theory of YouTube, right there, and it has been compounding on itself for two decades. It has made YouTube enormous, and enormously powerful. But the job’s not done: there are always new formats, new content types, and new devices to reckon with. YouTube’s ambitions are only getting bigger, too — the company clearly aspires to be the size of the entertainment industry, or maybe even be the entertainment industry. That is going to require history’s largest video collection to get much, much larger.The many faces of YouTubeWhen I ask Brian Albert, a managing director on YouTube’s advertising team, to explain YouTube to me the way he explains it to clients, he breaks the platform into three separate categories. There’s streaming, the high-end stuff that competes with Netflix and the rest. There’s also social video, in YouTube’s case mostly meaning Shorts, up against TikTok and Reels. And there’s what Albert calls “straight online video,” the kind of creator-led mid- and long-form video you really only find on YouTube. “We have competitors across the board,” Albert said, “but there’s no single competitor who plays in each of those three lanes.”Albert delineates things this way because that’s how advertisers think about video. YouTube’s clients have budgets, and those budgets have categories — over the years, as YouTube has become a more sophisticated business, it has tried to convince advertisers of the unique value of YouTube but also to give them a place to put the dollars earmarked for live sports or prestige TV. The goal is to get advertisers in the door with products they already know, and then try to sell them on everything else. “Advertisers for a while now have been buying us like TV or like digital video,” said Tara Walpert Levy, YouTube’s vice president for the Americas. “Now they’re leaning in much more heavily on things like commerce or brand deals.” (YouTube, of course, gets a cut whenever you buy something through a shop or a sponsored video.) Advertisers have long been wary of putting too much emphasis on one thing, preferring to spread their spend around. YouTube is increasingly making the argument that it’s possible to hit all your budgets and all your target markets, all on one platform.If you look at YouTube as a series of products reverse-engineered from advertising budgets, the company’s many offerings start to make a kind of sense. Shorts look like TikToks and Reels because that’s what people like to watch, but also because creative agencies are already used to making short, vertical video ads. YouTube spent billions on NFL Sunday Ticket, and made a whole cable-replacement bundle in YouTube TV, to make pivoting from TV ads to digital ads as simple as possible. YouTube builds huge packages around awards shows, March Madness, and other big cultural moments, because that’s what the money is earmarked for.The simplest way to understand YouTube is as an insatiable content collector, constantly searching for anything that smells like time spentUltimately, though, the simplest way to understand YouTube is as an insatiable content collector, constantly searching for anything that smells like time spent. YouTube knows that its whole system — the sharp recommendation algorithm, the creator tools, the vast swaths of money — only works if it ultimately leads to someone creating the exact right thing to recommend to you every time you open the app. That’s one reason it pays creators better than other social platforms; it knows better than most that incentivizing them to make content makes the whole thing go. That’s why YouTube has spent so much time, money, and energy hoovering up every kind of content imaginable. YouTube was built on the back of pirated TV — you could argue the SNL sketch “Lazy Sunday” was the first viral YouTube video, and its huge popularity led to the billion-dollar Viacom lawsuit that briefly threatened to kill YouTube entirely, but ultimately both established it as a place safely full of copyright theft and taught YouTube the value of making deals. For years, YouTube tried to create its own Emmy-worthy shows and Oscar-winning movies, before eventually developing things like Primetime Channels that brought other streaming services onto the platform. (Now we have companies like Warner Bros. just dumping full movies onto YouTube, hoping they’ll get picked up by the algorithm.) The cable-like deals struck for YouTube TV bring all-important live events onto YouTube. By investing in podcasts and YouTube Music, YouTube turned itself into an audio-friendly service too. (YouTube Music is substantially smaller than Spotify or Apple Music, but if you include people consuming music on YouTube it’s the biggest music platform by a mile.) The goal is all the same: anytime you want content of any kind, you’ll open YouTube. I get the sense YouTube would happily start printing books if it thought people still liked to read.You really can’t overstate the importance of the sheer tonnage of YouTube, when you’re looking at why it has worked. Consider a counterexample: Netflix, which has somewhere in the range of 6,500 titles available. Total. “Netflix might have the algorithm knowledge of ‘we’ve seen what you like, and we can tell you what the next perfect movie would be for you,’” Pablo Lucio Paredes, head of engineering and data at the streaming guide company Reelgood, told me last year. “But does Netflix have that actual movie?” YouTube may not have Stranger Things (at least not officially), but it has a few billion other things you might like. And over the last 20 years, it has also managed to convince a lot of people that they’d rather watch MrBeast than the scrappy kids in Hawkins, Indiana.That’s content-biz, babyThere’s plenty of existing content left for YouTube to bring onto the platform, but the way YouTube wins is by getting creators to create. The company has always understood that its homegrown talent is its greatest asset. But every YouTuber eventually feels the platform’s constant desire for more content; if you don’t feed the algorithm, and tap into every new trend and format that bubbles up across the ecosystem, you might get left behind. YouTube seems to mint new creators faster than it burns them out, but that might not be true forever. And as the platform continues to grow, it’s harder and harder for new creators to find a big audience. Eventually, YouTube risks becoming too big for its own good.YouTube is betting on AI to solve a lot of its problems. The company has spent the last couple of years putting AI to work on practically every part of the creator experience, from replying to comments to coming up with ideas to making wholly generated videos. The company is also extremely bullish on using AI to automatically dub videos into other languages. If it all works, it could increase the YouTube library — and the platform’s chance of always having the right video to show you — like nothing ever has. If it doesn’t work, though, it could poison the well with AI slop and turn YouTube into a platform chock-full of content no one wants. One of these fates appears to be waiting for just about every content maker on the planet. The other ultra-ambitious plan for increasing content is coming in video games. Years ago, YouTube tried to compete directly with Twitch as a game-streaming platform, via a separate app called YouTube Gaming, which didn’t really work. Now gamers use YouTube as a platform for content about games, or just content that only makes sense in a world where everyone plays games. “If you had told me when we were building the gaming app,” said Katherine de León, who leads gaming at YouTube, “that in 2025, one of the biggest gaming creators on YouTube would be a mother of four in Texas who makes Minecraft roleplay videos for girls and women, I would have told you to go home.” She also points to huge hits like Skibidi Toilet as the kind of content that only makes sense when everyone’s a gamer.More recently, YouTube has started to offer what it calls “Playables.” They are essentially mini-games inside of YouTube, and feel a little like what you’d expect to find on Facebook circa the Zynga days. There are what appear to be official versions of Crossy Road and Angry Birds, multiple takes on solitaire and chess; and three identical-looking games called Bubble Pop Star, Bubble Shooter, and Bubble Tower 3D. Each one loads like a mini-app inside YouTube.“It’s consumption and creation, right?”At first glance, Playables make no sense. There are no built-in livestreaming tools or comment threads, no sign at all you’re even on YouTube. But de León makes two arguments in favor of Playables. One is that people like playing games, and that’s enough. They’re good content. But the long-term strategy hinges on games that are their own content-creation machines. “A lot of our top games on YouTube are sandbox games,” she said. “It’s consumption and creation, right?” In Fortnite, Roblox, and elsewhere, players are making content in the games, making content about the games, and making content with the tools of the game. I’m pretty sure Bubble Tower 3D isn’t going to turn into a content machine. So at some point, if you want to be the internet’s great content engine, you just build your own Roblox, right? At this, de León mostly just smiles. She was a game dev for years before coming to Google – her answer is clear. But all she’ll say is, it would definitely make sense. “As a game maker of 17 years, I’m excited about that whole loop,” she said. “You can watch, you can play, you can comment, and you can do it in Shorts, you can do it on YouTube TV, you can do it in a live-streaming channel.” Aping Roblox isn’t easy – just ask everyone who’s ever wasted millions or billions of dollars trying to build a live-service game people love — and it would be YouTube’s biggest structural change yet. But it’s content. So YouTube will try.The everywhere appWhile most of YouTube goes out and tries to corner the content market, the engineering team’s job is to take all of these disparate projects and make them something akin to universally accessible. “It’s one of the things YouTube has excelled at from the very early days,” said John Harding, a VP of engineering at YouTube. “We figure out how to get your media everywhere.” Once upon a time, that meant a web browser on your desktop computer. Now it’s much more than that. “I used to say we were trying to get YouTube on anything with a network connection and a screen,” Harding said. “Now we’re trying to get YouTube on things that don’t have network connections — and don’t have screens.”“Now we’re trying to get YouTube on things that don’t have network connections — and don’t have screens.”In fact, Silver reckons, YouTube might be the Google application that can run on the most devices. “Except maybe Search,” he said, before reconsidering. “But then, you don’t really search on your TV, you don’t really search on your watch. But YouTube has to work on all of those devices, from set-top boxes to TVs to VR headsets to watches to car players. And then, of course, mobile phones and desktops and all those kinds of things.” It’s a hard job no matter what, and much harder when you have to reinvent the wheel on every new device. As much as possible, Silver said, “what we try to do is push stuff into our base platform.” No matter where you load a YouTube video, the goal is to have it run as much identical code as possible. Sometimes features might get developed for one part of the platform — like multi-view on YouTube TV, so people can watch four games at a time — but much of that is then brought back to the overall codebase. The goal, Silver said, is to build things as few times as possible.For 20 years, that’s how it has worked: get all the content, get it everywhere. The “all” and the “everywhere” in that plan have both expanded dramatically since the days of “Me at the zoo” in a desktop browser, but the job is still the job. And while YouTube’s competitors have occasionally beaten it in certain ways, particularly recently — people speak in reverent tones about how well TikTok’s algorithm understands them, and YouTube doesn’t have a capture-and-edit tool nearly as good as Instagram or CapCut — nobody has yet managed to copy the whole system. Get people to make videos; put those videos in front of the right people; pay the people who make the videos so they’ll make more. Somehow nobody else is doing that right. And the bigger YouTube gets, the more money comes into the ecosystem, the faster the flywheel turns.Now, though, YouTube is the established giant and no longer the cool upstart. It has convinced the world that creators are celebrities, that prank videos and documentaries can co-exist, that it is a mainstream entertainment business. As Walpert Levy put it, YouTube has reached the “nobody ever got fired for advertising on YouTube” phase. Now the company has its sights on everything from podcasts to gaming, with ideas about how to make them more YouTube-y. The YouTube-ification of the entertainment business is only just getting started. And it’s all a big bet that you’ll be there, watching, the whole time.See More: