Google appears to have tweaked its YouTube Gaming listings to make certain series including Dead or Alive Xtreme and Senran Kagura a bit less visible.
YouTube users can normally associate their videos with a game listed on YouTube Gaming. This makes a link appear at the bottom of the video, allowing users to browse other videos from the same game.
You can see what it looks like below for a Dead or Alive 6 videos.
Up until a few days ago, similar listings were available for Dead or Alive Xtreme and Senran Kagura games. Now they have been removed.
To be more precise, all listings for Dead or Alive Xtreme games have been completely removed, while the only Senran Kagura title surviving this purge is the mobile game Shinobi Master Senran Kagura: New Link. This involves both videos uploaded by private users and official trailers released by developers and publishers on their official channels.
Whether the videos are age restricted or not also doesn’t make a difference, as the games are not selectable at all from the YouTube back end.
It’s worth mentioning that this affects only the Dead or Alive Xtreme Spinoff series (Which for instance had listings for Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 and Dead or Alive Xtreme: Venus Vacation, as you can see below in the comparison between a live video and a snapshot of the same recovered via Google’s own cache) but not the mainline Dead or Alive series.
Some of the hub pages for the games affected still exist, like this one for Dead or Alive Xtreme: Venus Vacation, but they are now completely isolated and almost empty.
YouTube has made no announcement explaining this change, even if it’s likely to be tied to the fanservice content of the games affected. It’s also hard to say if other series with similar content have received the same treatment.
It’s worth mentioning that YouTube has made no effort to remove the actual videos at the moment. They have simply removed the listings from their YouTube Gaming roster, which hinders the discoverability of the games on the platform but doesn’t erase them completely.
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