Is Your Gaming Content Safe from YouTube’s New Policy?
YouTube announced policy updates this week affecting gaming creators starting November 17th, 2025. The platform is expanding enforcement around graphic violence in gaming and tightening restrictions on gambling-related content.
What’s Actually Changing
The update targets three main areas:
1. Online Gambling Content
YouTube is expanding enforcement to cover online gambling with digital goods including video game skins (CS2), cosmetics, and NFTs. This should help reduce sketchy gambling site promotions.
Content depicting or promoting casino-style games where nothing of real-world monetary value is wagered will now be age-restricted.
3. Graphic Gaming Content
YouTube will age-restrict video game content featuring realistic human characters that focuses on scenes of torture or mass violence against non-combatants.
The platform evaluates content based on:
- Duration: Sustained graphic scenes versus fleeting moments (cumulative duration for compilation videos)
- Prominence: Whether violent imagery is zoomed-in or the main focus
- Realistic Human Characters: Violence happening to characters that look like real humans
This directly impacts games like Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Hitman, and titles with graphic scenes. The key is whether your content centers around these moments rather than just showing them incidentally.
What You Need to Do
Content uploaded before November 17th that violates these guidelines may be removed or age-restricted, but will not result in a strike. Age-restricted videos can stay on your channel for 18+ audiences.
Before the deadline:
- Review your library for videos focusing on prolonged violence against civilians
- Use YouTube’s trim and blur tools to modify problematic content
- Adjust your content strategy to avoid making graphic civilian violence the focus
- Monitor for age-restriction notifications and appeal if needed
Age-restricted videos face significant limitations: lower ad revenue, no recommendations for logged-out users, can’t be embedded externally, and reduced discoverability. For creators who upload gaming content to YouTube, now is the time to audit your library and adjust your approach.
Creating Professional Vertical Clips While Live
After a couple of years away from making videos, I’ve released something many of you have been asking for: a comprehensive guide on capturing high-quality vertical recordings while you’re streaming.
With Twitch and YouTube both pushing dual-format streaming (which we’ve covered extensively in recent newsletters), the demand for vertical content has exploded. But most streamers are stuck downloading flat, low-quality clips from Twitch or trying to crop their 16:9 VODs into 9:16 – and it shows.
In this new video, I walk through the exact process for setting up OBS to capture amazing vertical moments with a single hotkey, complete with isolated audio tracks and polished visuals ready for editing. We cover essential plugins, custom masks for showing specific game UI elements in the 9:16 frame that would normally be cut off, multitrack audio separation, and automated clip saving.
I’ve also built a free platform safe zone checker on the Gaming Careers website that lets you test your vertical videos against each platform’s UI elements. You can see exactly what gets hidden behind like buttons, profile pictures, and other interface elements before you publish.
If you’ve been wanting to level up your short-form content strategy, this video has everything you need to start capturing professional vertical clips from day one.
Watch: How to Create Ultra High-Quality Vertical Clips While Live
Pete’s Content Corner
Delve into my weekly selection of content creation highlights – handpicked videos, podcasts, and tweets that promise to captivate, educate, and entertain.
- YouTube announced that Shorts now generates more revenue per watch hour than long-form content, with total YouTube ad revenue surpassing $10 billion in Q3 2025 for the first time.
- TikTok increased its subscription revenue split to 70% for creators with an additional 20% bonus available for those who meet specific requirements: 10K followers, 100K views in the last month, and 3+ subscription-only videos posted monthly. This means eligible creators can receive up to 90% of subscription revenue after fees.
- Discord is internally testing improvements to its clipping experience, including a better clip library, overhauled editing interfaces, and in-chat reminders to send recently captured clips.
Thanks, as always, for taking the time to read Stream Report.
Pete ✌️
