After tons of rumors that YouTube’s parent company, Google, would purchase Twitch—the current reigning champion of video game streaming—and that prospect dying with Amazon acquiring the company instead, YouTube is finally ready to launch its own dedicated service for video game streaming content: YouTube Gaming. Brace yourselves, Internet. The battle for supremacy in video game streaming is about to get ugly.
But it’s also going to get so pretty! Live gameplay streaming has become a huge form of online entertainment recently, but it’s also somehow managed to fly under the “mainstream” radar with small, new names in tech taking it most seriously. However, with Twitch teaming up with Amazon and YouTube getting in on the game, consumers and streamers alike should soon have their pick of high quality services.
Along with their new service, YouTube will release a YouTube Gaming app for mobile watching as well as to handle features like direct notifications when a channel you’ve subscribed to starts streaming live. There will, of course, be tablet versions and a desktop interface as well, which looks a bit like it was inspired by Steam:
A gamer-friendly aesthetic to be sure.
YouTube Gaming will roll out over an unspecified time period this summer, but they’ll have a booth and undoubtedly more information to reveal at the E3 gaming convention next week. Of course, YouTube is already capable of live streams, but YouTube’s global head of gaming partnerships, Ryan Wyatt, announced that YouTube Gaming would bring with it some gaming-oriented streamlining:
[I]n the coming weeks, we’ll launch an improved live experience that makes it simpler to broadcast your gameplay to YouTube. On top of existing features like high frame rate streaming at 60fps, DVR, and automatically converting your stream into a YouTube video, we’re redesigning our system so that you no longer need to schedule a live event ahead of time. We’re also creating single link you can share for all your streams.
Of course, the big deal here is that YouTube is finally making a serious effort to recognize game streaming as its own form of content that deserves a spotlight to thrive under. Game streaming is outgrowing just being lumped in with other video content, and it’s great to see the biggest video site on the Internet acknowledge it. Wyatt also wrote, “Live streams bring the gaming community closer together, so we’ve put them front-and-center on the YouTube Gaming homepage,” and, “[Y]ou can search with confidence, knowing that typing ‘call’ will show you ‘Call of Duty’ and not ‘Call Me Maybe.'”
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Published: Jun 12, 2015 04:21 pm