In competition with Twitch.
By Raif Karerat
After losing out to Amazon in a bidding war over popular video game streaming website Twitch last year, YouTube is now set to launch its own website dedicated to gaming to directly compete it.
The new site, gaming.youtube.com is expected to go live on Wednesday evening, and was initially announced in June before the annual E3 gaming conference.
As described by Engadget, which got a peek at the new page, the “sleek” layout features subscribed channels lined up on the right, opposite game pages, trending, and featured titles on the left. Live channels are situated at the top, denoted by a red dot.
“We wanted to create a one-stop shop for all gaming content,” Ryan Wyatt, YouTube’s head of gaming, told the BBC. “At the moment there is a fragmented experience. People go to different places for live content, and YouTube for video on demand. We have amazing gamers that don’t live stream yet. Now they have that opportunity.”
As well as a web service, YouTube Gaming is slated to have its own dedicated Android and iOS apps. YouTube’s new website will assimilate many of the gaming videos already on its main service, which will also make it easier to find videos and stream gameplay.
Individual pages are on the docket for more than 25,000 games, and YouTube has promised the service will be home to “the biggest community of gamers on the web,” a bold claim considering Twitch — valued at $907 million when Amazon bought it — is the United States’ fourth most popular website when measured by peak internet traffic.