In June 2015, Google announced a YouTube spinoff to compete with Amazon's Twitch. And on August 26th, the search engine company officially launches it to public.
As its attempt in taking on Twitch, YouTube Gaming acts as a central hub where people can find and watch people live streaming their own video gameplay.
Amazon's Twitch is already a huge market where Google is aiming to dig. The service already has over 1.5 million broadcasters that gather over 100 million visitors every month. But with YouTube's massive popularity, it's already hosting videos where people can watch recorded gameplay. With YouTube Gaming, Google wants to make YouTube not just the most popular video website, but also the most popular livestreaming site.
Previously, Google was interested in acquiring Twitch, and was in a bidding competition against Amazon. But since Amazon won the bid and acquired Twitch, Google that was interested in joining the party, creates its own in-house Twitch to resemble YouTube.
YouTube Gaming that initially launches in the U.S. and UK, features more than 25,000 pages for specific game titles, each with livestreams, promotional videos, gameplay footages and more. People can follow livestreams and related content to their favorite games.
Viewers can chat with other members during livestream, and the creators can monitor the comments from the app, with each stream having their own custom URL for easy sharing.
Users can also search and follow YouTube creators who blog specifically about games to find review, walkthrough, commentary and unboxing videos. YouTube provides their profile pages to have a slightly refreshed UI to match the colors to the video game art.
Livestreams play at 60fps in HTML5 form, and uses the same technology as YouTube's.
With YouTube Gaming, Google is hoping to make the spinoff a website where gamers can gather and have their own dedicated space in its ecosystem to find content specifically related to their interest. "Typing 'call' will show you 'Call of Duty' and not 'Call Me Maybe,'" wrote Google in a blog post.
YouTube Gaming is definitely Twitch's biggest competitor. Since almost every Twitch streamers also use YouTube to archive their purpose and getting additional revenue stream, with YouTube Gaming, YouTube wants to be the one stop solution for every kind of gaming video on the web.
YouTube Gaming is a spinoff of YouTube dedicated to a specific audience. Just like YouTube Kids which aims for users from younger generations.