YouTube One Ups Twitch with New Gaming App - The UpStream

YouTube One Ups Twitch with New Gaming App

posted Sunday Jun 14, 2015 by Nicholas DiMeo

YouTube One Ups Twitch with New Gaming App

The battle for game-streaming supremacy has raged on for a while now, with armies increasing for all parties. After Amazon acquired Twitch for almost $1 billion, it was made known that YouTube tried to pick up the company but Twitch wouldn't go for it. Not long after, YouTube threw money at creators for exclusive rights and deals in the gaming space, and we knew then that it wouldn't be the end of the saga just yet. Now, Google has fired a warning shot from its bow with news of a new gaming app on the horizon.

YouTube Gaming will be centered around both a website and app featuring game videos and live streams. YouTube will have specific pages for almost 25,000 different games, along with pages for each partner and network.

With Twitch taking the lead in the gaming space for the time being, and MLG.tv, Hitbox and Vimeo making huge impacts as well, this is YouTube's full-push to prove its top spot as a video-streaming platform. YouTube already has some of the top celebrities in the gaming world, but giving those content creators a permanent and tailored home might be the thing that keeps them from leaving. You know, aside from the boatloads of cash they've been offered.

As of right now, a lot of this is just speculation, with the YouTube Gaming landing page simply saying that we'll see it launch sometime in 2015. However the implications behind the landing page are strong. YouTube has launched several different avenues for growth and is hoping one, or more, of them take off in a viral way. The prideful Twitch devs will have to find a way to respond, and it will probably have to start with a revamp of their curation, interface and features. Twitch is good at video quality and consistency but it has to compete with the deep pockets of Google's video baby, and that's a hard thing to do even if you do have Amazon backing you.

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