YouTube gives Twitch a run for its money with a new live gaming service

After months of development, YouTube Gaming has officially been launched. 

 

 

The live-streaming video gaming service, which comes as an app and a website, will take on rivals such as Daily Motion and Amazon-owned Twitch.

 

Google, which owns YouTube, revealed that it was building the platform two months ago, as a reaction to the rise in popularity of live-streaming games on the internet. The company said its viewers spend billions of hours each month watching videos of other people's games. 

 

 

But Twitch is currently the go-to place for live gamers, having benefited from its integration into both Sony's Playstation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One. The platform now has 1.5m broadcasters, with an average 100m viewers per month. 

 

Last year, Google tried to buy Twitch but failed, and it fell instead into the hands of Amazon for a price of $970m. 

 

But YouTube is attempting to offer an alternative that's just as good – it has pages hosted on its site for more than 25,000 video games.

 

Ryan Wyatt, head of gaming at YouTube, told the BBC the company wanted to create a “one-stop shop for all gaming content”.