Google has an incredible appetite for anything it feels will be a great advertising platform, and YouTube Gaming is its newest product. On Tuesday, Google launched YouTube Gaming with great fanfare, and will compete directly with the game-streaming monopoly known as Twitch.
YouTube Gaming
Last year, Twitch put itself up for grabs. Everyone expected Google to hop on the prey, but it was Amazon who actually picked up the streaming giant for $970 million. It’s not known whether or not Google simply wasn’t looking to pay that kind of money, or if the company just wasn’t interested, but it did mark the beginning of YouTube’s revamp.
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YouTube went through a few key changes that were directly related to building a game-centric streaming platform. Google spent a lot of time building up YouTube’s streaming capabilities, and even included an option that allowed content creators the ability to upload video that played back at sixty frames per second (fps). All of those changes culminated to YouTube Gaming.
A Familiar Face
YouTube Gaming uses a color scheme that many will find comforting since it’s a mixture of blacks and grays; colors that are often used in games, Steam, and plenty of other platforms familiar with gamers. The main page has a variety of popular streams, and is flanked by featured channels on one side, and trending games on another. The latter is a great improvement over how YouTube used to handle gaming since you would have to search specifically for each game, and even then, the results were often a mixed bag.
YouTube Has a Few Cards Up Its Sleeve
Right off the bat, YouTube Gaming has a lot of advantages over Twitch. First off, YouTube is already an incredibly popular platform, and users are able to watch years of archived gaming content directly through YouTube Gaming. Which leads us to our next point: YouTube Gaming simply has a much better video player. Whereas Twitch’s video player is using Flash, a platform being made obsolete, YouTube uses HTML 5. There are plenty of times where Twitch’s video player simply doesn’t work, and Flash is usually the culprit.
One thing’s for sure, YouTube Gaming will be giving Twitch some much needed competition.
