YouTube Gaming is to be a destination to find gaming videos, Internet personalities and live streams.
YouTube wants to win over gamers. The video giant online announced its plans before the Electronic Entertainment Expo next week to launch a separate site and app specifically for video games fans.
Alan Joyce the product manager for YouTube said through a prepared statement on Friday that the new site – YouTube Gaming – will be a new destination for users looking for gaming videos, Internet personalities and live streaming. The site and app will feature pages dedicated to over 25,000 games.
YouTube will be seeking to make life easier for its users to broadcast live as well as participate in competitive gaming known otherwise as e-sports, by creating individual links that are able to be shared and remove the need to have a pre-scheduled date for broadcasting.
In the upcoming weeks, there will be improvements made to the live product and the company does not want to invest from a content perspective in e-sports, said Ryan Wyatt the global head of YouTube’s gaming content.
In some ways, added Wyatt, its nascent, but there is something that can be said about e-sports future and we want to be a big part of it.
This move by YouTube, which is owned by Google, takes a direct aim at Amazon’s Twitch, the streaming video website that is gaming centric that the e-commerce behemoth acquired in 2014 for close to $1 billion.
While the dominant video site online remains YouTube, Twitch has been able to solidify itself over the past three years as a strong destination for streaming gameplay from many popular titles.
Twitch now has over 100 million users that watch each month over 1.5 million broadcasts. YouTube Gaming should debut this summer across the UK and the U.S. The app as well as the site will be previewed at the Expo starting on Tuesday.
