For reasons that I personally cannot understand, people really enjoy watching other people playing video games. Twitch and YouTube are the primary destinations for people looking to watch other people play video games, but while Twitch is dedicated almost exclusively to gaming, YouTube has a potpourri of content. That’s why, in order to compete with Twitch and centralize all of its gaming content, YouTube has announced that it’ll be releasing a new, independent, game-centric service known as YouTube Gaming in the coming months.
Remember the scuttlebutt back in March about YouTube ramping up its gaming presence? Turns out it wasn’t wishful thinking: the Google-owned video sharing titan on Friday unveiled “YouTube Gaming,” a new games-centric service not to be confused with “YouTube #Gaming,” the company’s longtime games aggregation channel. YouTube Gaming, which YouTube says will launch in the next few months, is both a new standalone app as well as a revised web portal for YouTube’s gaming-verse. It packs the site’s gaming videos, livestreams and other community features into a single streamlined space, with new profile customization features that will let you add games to “favorites,” thereafter highlighting them during searches and tagging them as “My Games.” YouTube is also going to give “more than 25,000″ games their own discrete pages, it says. The company hypes that figure — simultaneously taking a polite swipe at Amazon-owned rival Twitch — by claiming YouTube has “more [gaming] videos than anywhere else.” That’s a lot of curation, but it could help clean up the service, too. Each game page will now have tabs that show the official YouTube pages for the game’s publisher.
