Monday, May 11, 2015

No more YouTube videos on Steam?

UPDATED! 


If you're a gamer chances are you're on Steam and have even posted a few videos on YouTube of your exploits.  Until recently Steam allowed you to post your YouTube videos to your account and make them available to other STEAM users.  

In my case, I've got over 200 videos shared on YouTube and for me it's another avenue to share my gaming experiences and promote my content.

That was until today...

Around April 20th YouTube sent out a quiet little warning to everyone who used their version 2.0 API to stream content to their respective apps.

Apparently it was too quiet as 3 weeks have gone by and today Steam will no longer allow me or any other Steam user to share videos from YouTube.

What's annoying about this is that something so major has gone largely unannounced and apparently unaddressed without so much as a post in a STEAM forum.  The only thing that even suggested a warning was a strange little video that showed up in my Steam video gallery.

Somebody dropped the ball...

Was it YouTube who has a history of making unilateral changes to critical services without bothering to tell anyone till after the fact? 

Was it Valve (STEAM) for not bothering to pay attention subsequently crippling what has become a critical community tool?

Was it the users for not raising the red flag sooner?  We all know that nobody listens to users anymore unless they do something "viral" 

Well, the answer is YES.  It's them and it's us but the only people with any power to affect change in this case is STEAM.  They've been warned for at least 3 weeks, likely longer and have done absolutely nothing.  Worse they didn't bother to warn the users or suggest a timetable for a fix.

Until they do I'd advise anyone who shares YouTube videos to their STEAM profile to do the same thing that Valve has.  That is, nothing.  Don't unlink your account, don't mess with your YouTube settings, nothing.  Do absolutely nothing with your video settings as many users have reported losing the videos they already had on STEAM and being unable to reattach their YouTube account.


Hopefully the next STEAM client update will finally address the problem. 


UPDATE!  As of 4PM 5-13-2015 STEAM has fixed the YouTube issue and you can again post videos from your YouTube account.  Note that you will have to RE-Link your YouTube account to STEAM but your old videos will still be there.  If you tried to re-link your account before the fix, however,  you may have to add your videos all over again.


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