YouTube Gaming Goes Live

YouTube Gaming demonstrates the efforts of Google in making its services stream-friendly. The latest games-focused website was launched by the online search giant recently and was developed to compete directly with Twitch. It also serves as the platform for the launch of “Let’s Play” as well as the gaming library currently found on YouTube.

YouTube has been looking into entering the video game streaming market, which is dominated by Twitch, for some time already. After Twitch became available in the market, reports hinted at the possibility that Google will acquire it. However, Amazon beat Google to the punch and acquired Twitch for $970 million. Due to this, Google worked on making YouTube a direct competitor of the service. The company enhanced its streaming capabilities and facilitated uploading of videos with a frame rate of 60 fps.

YouTube Gaming Goes Live - image credit: youtube.com

The preparations may give Google a good chance of taking on Twitch. The design of YouTube Gaming appears to be cleaner, smoother and more pleasant. The charcoal color theme of the site calls to mind Steam, which may be designed to make it appealing to gamers. While the interface is dense, it is responsive and provides information similar to the ones found on Twitch. The design is also pleasant to the eyes since it does not depend on large-sized advertisements in the background.

The video player epitomizes the enhancements on the Twitch model since it does not rely on Adobe Flash. The video player of Twitch uses Adobe Flash, which crashes often. The proprietary player developed by Google has benefitted YouTube Gaming since it uses HTML5.

The new site of Google also benefits from numerous video game videos posted on the service. Users can also play old videos as streams without the live chat feature, and can be searched according to game. Google may be able to entice current Twitch users with YouTube Gaming since it enhanced the features offered by Twitch while tapping into the huge number of users currently visiting YouTube.

Posted by George Daniels on Thursday August 27 2015, 9:55 AM EST. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under Technology. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0