After losing the bid to acquire Twitch last year, Google announced on Friday that it is launching its own gaming website and app called YouTube Gaming. The site is expected to go live this summer and with more than 25,000 games, as it aims to be the best destination for gamers.
"YouTube Gaming is built to be all about your favorite games and gamers, with more videos than anywhere else," YouTube wrote in a statement.
Ryan Wyatt, YouTube's global head of gaming content, hinted about the product last month.
"When I look at where YouTube is weaker in the gaming content space, I think live and e-sports," Wyatt said in an interview with the New York Times last month. "In the coming weeks, you're going to see us make improvements to our live product, and we do want to invest in e-sports from a content perspective. In some ways, it's still nascent, but there is something to say about the future of e-sports, and we definitely want to be part of it."
YouTube Gaming will be maintained by the publishers and YouTube personalities. It is very similar to Twitch because of the live streams, the main reason Google was interested in Twitch last year but lost it to Amazon.
Gaming channels occupies half of the top 100 channels of YouTube, suggesting a huge market. Google said that hundreds of millions of gamers visit the video-sharing site just to watch recorded game videos, according to Bloomberg.
Google will unveil the new features of YouTube Gaming in the next few weeks, although it hinted that it will focus more on making it easier for the gamers to broadcast their gameplay via live stream, CNET reported.
It is hard to tell whether YouTube Gaming can compete with Twitch, which has a large user base at 100 million regular viewers and 1.5 million broadcasters. The gaming site will initially be available to the U.S. and the U.K. Google will have a demo of the project at next week's Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.
