YouTube is making its own Twitch-like emotes

YouTube is starting to roll out its own custom emotes. The Twitch-like emotes, dubbed YouTube Emotes, can be used across YouTube in comment sections and during live chats, though the platform previously allowed individual streamers to offer their own reactions and emotes. YouTube’s own initial emotes are focused on gaming, but there will be more over time.

You’ll now see a list of YouTube emotes when you open YouTube’s emoji picker, and they’ll appear below a channel’s own existing custom emotes. Much like Twitch’s default system-wide emotes, YouTube’s ones also have specific names for autocomplete so you quickly type “:cat-orange-whistling:” for example, and it will automatically fill a comment with an orange cat whistling.

Unsurprisingly, there isn’t a pogchamp emote, but YouTube hasn’t even added a default for the popular LUL Twitch emote. There are some game over, GG, and buffering ones, though.

“We’re starting with emotes created for Gaming but are working on bringing even more themes of emotes in the future, so stay tuned for emotes for even more communities!” says YouTube in a community post.

These gaming emotes were created by Abelle Hayford, Guy Field, and Yujin Won, so it’s reasonable to assume with this creator focus we’ll likely see further YouTube Emotes from independent artists in the future.