Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 in-game live streaming is to YouTube

A day after EA announced Twitch support for Origin, Activision has announced Call of Duty: Black Ops 2's eye-catching live streaming feature links with YouTube.

Black Ops 2 will let players live stream gameplay on YouTube directly from the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 - a first of its kind, according to Activision. No mention was made of the PC or Wii U versions.

We already knew Black Ops 2 would let players live stream multiplayer League Play games, but now we know to which website (word on the street was Activision was close to striking a deal with Twitch). You can also stream your webcam and audio commentary while playing.

If you watch on Elite you'll see the player card of the streamer as well as class loadouts, recent match data and career stats across COD games supported by Elite.

"With our competitive play and eSports initiatives, we wanted to deliver live streaming capabilities built right into Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, because Call of Duty is not only fun and exciting to play, but we believe it will be just as exciting to watch,” said Treyarch boss Mark Lamia.

“By making the capability of live streaming as accessible as possible to our fans, straight from a player's console without the need for any additional hardware or sophisticated setups, we are empowering our fans to share their multiplayer experiences."

In the small print Activision said live streams “will be subject to limitations and restrictions” and “additional live stream destinations will be announced in the future”. To Twitch?

At Gamescom in August Treyarch design director David Vonderhaar told Eurogamer Black Ops 2's live streaming performance issues, if there are any, will be the result of player bandwidth and not the game itself.

"It doesn't have a lot of negative at all right now," he said. "This is why it has to be in League Play, because the League Play networking is set up for it.

"Look, you can't catch me saying never, because there's one thing I don't have in our control, and that's your bandwidth. If I said to you, no, it's never going to have any performance implications and then you don't have enough bandwidth to actually upstream, that wouldn't be a fair thing to say.

"But it's not having any game impact. That's a really important part, and that's measurable, and we know that.

"For an average gamer, he doesn't necessarily understand and know the difference between when the game is performing well because of the game or because of something on the networking side. It's a rough thing to square up for people. So I say, we live stream all the time. We're testing and we're evaluating the performance on the game all the time. It's not having a negative impact on the game. But we also have lots of bandwidth."

Black Ops 2's suite of new multiplayer features sets the game up to make an assault on the growing eSports scene. As well as live streaming there's League Play and what's called CODcasting - an interface that allows shoutcasters to create a better "show".

"I want to make something for everybody and for the masses. That's what I'm interested in," Vonderhaar said.