Google Announces Their Own Video Game Streaming Platform

Google has announced launching of YouTube Gaming site and app, dedicated to video-game related content. It is hard not to notice that the new Google’s service will work just like the Twitch, a live streaming gaming site that was purchased by Amazon for $970m. YouTube Gaming is definitely Google’s answer to Twitch as Google has lost out to Amazon in an attempt to acquire Twitch in 2014.

YouTube Gaming site will feature pages dedicated to more than 25,000 games and it will be completely separated from the rest of the YouTube.

YouTube’s head of gaming content, Ryan Wyatt, explained that this site will be destination for users to live stream and find gaming videos. The service will launch later this summer in U.S and UK will give gamers the experience that "they certainly deserve" as Wyatt put it.

YouTube is dominant online video site but Twitch has shown growth over the past three years as it currently boosts 100 million users who have an opportunity to follow some 1.5 million broadcasters every month.

Vice-president of marketing with Twitch, Mathew DiPietro, said that gaming video is clearly a big market at this point in time and it is no wonder that many companies and individuals want to get involved. In his opinion, YouTube Gaming will only inspire Twitch to work and try harder. However. many believe that Twitch will be in a very difficult situation as every Twitch user already has YouTube account.

It is hard to guess how difficult will be for Twitch to maintain its position when YouTube Gaming site launches but they will certainly need to give their users a good reason to stay on Twitch.

YouTube has demonstrated their product and showed how users will receive top results related to the video games. For example, if a user searches the word ‘call’ on the YouTube Gaming site/app, they will receive top result related to the video game ‘Call of Duty’ instead of result related to song ‘Call Me Maybe’ by Carly Rae Japsen. If a poker player searches for the word ‘poker’ it will not receive results such as Lady Gaga Poker Face video.

The news about the YouTube Gaming was announced on YouTube blog by Alan Joyce. The comments on the blog post were mostly positive, as people were happy with the announcement. The blog post also saw comments like ‘Bye Bye Twitch' and ‘I really hope they don’t put Twitch out of business’.