Google is now taking on the company it tried to buy last year. Stepping exclusively into game streaming, Google today announced YouTube Gaming app and website, in a bid to take on Twitch, which Amazon reportedly snapped away from Google in a $970 Million deal last year.
Google’s inclination towards getting or designing a game-streaming platform of its own was pretty evident in its last year’s attempt to purchase Twitch. And since it couldn’t get Twitch, even after it reportedly offered a larger amount as compared to the original Amazon deal, the search giant is putting up a real strong, serious contender to take on Twitch.
Gaming themed videos, both live-streaming and on-demand were, until now, a part of the normal YouTube interface. We could search for many different uploaders and get gaming tutorials or other experiences over YouTube like we could do with any other type of video.
Google is positioning YouTube Gaming as a separate platform from YouTube, with over 25,000 gaming title pages, which will be a one stop shop for all the videos and live streams about that title. You’ll also find channels from a wide array of game publishers and YouTube creators. This new partition from YouTube will apparently help in enhancing the user experience for gamers. Moreover, the company says that searching for videos will be faster and swifter.
However, YouTube Gaming is also a result of numerous tweaks which Google bought to YouTube in the past few months to enhance video-game streaming experience. It introduced a faster 60 Frames per Second streaming speed to live streaming videos, keeping in mind the particular needs of high quality gaming and the recent surge in computer gaming as spectator sport.
And this isn’t it, Google says that it will “launch an improved live experience that makes it simpler to broadcast your gameplay to YouTube”.
Google s also integrating Hangouts into YouTube gaming to enable gamers to chat live with fellow gamers across any platform – iOS, Android or Web. Shelf is another feature, exclusive to Youtube Gaming, which lets gamers create customised YouTube channel of sorts for themselves.
Good shelf organization and naming will create a killer channel in the YouTube Gaming App. pic.twitter.com/h1HKFx64Ek
— YouTube Gaming (@YouTubeGaming) June 12, 2015
But then, Twitch has dominated the video game streaming sector for a while now, which as of last year stood at a staggering 100 million viewers each month with 1.5 million broadcasters. Google is looking to take a slice of this pie.
YouTube Gaming is said to have a website as well as an app counterpart. Both apps and website haven’t been launched yet, though you can expect a to know more on the same in the E3 expo starting next week.
However, do note that Google isn’t the only trying to take on Twitch. Smaller video streaming rival DailyMotion too came up with a dedicated video game streaming website called DailyMotion Games. And at the time of launch DailyMotion claimed, that gaming videos were generating a whopping 180 million video views every month and draws 11 million unique visitors every month to its network.
YouTube Gaming will be available this summer, starting with the U.S. and U.K.
Meanwhile, YouTube Gaming Player 2 has already received a warm welcome from Twitch :
