YouTube has recently announced plans to launch a dedicated site and app for gaming in an effort to take on Amazon-owned streaming service Twitch.
Twitch allows gaming fans to watch and interact with live broadcasts of others playing games. Google, which owns YouTube, is understood to have made a bid for Twitch last year, only to be outbid by Amazon’s USD 970 million offer, reports the BBC.
The search giant said the service would launch later this summer.
“On YouTube, gaming has spawned entirely new genres of videos, from let’s plays, walkthroughs, and speedruns to cooking and music videos. Now, it’s our turn to return the favour with something built just for gamers,”
YouTube Gaming product manager Alan Joyce said in a blogpost.
Like Twitch, YouTube also allows for a “tip jar” function for viewers to send money to the broadcaster.
YouTube Gaming will consist of 25,000 individual game portals which bring together all the activity around each title on a single page.
Google will be hoping the new services will lure gamers away from rival Twitch which currently dominates the market for live online broadcasting. Around 12 billion hours of live gaming are watched on the site every month.
