YouTube Gaming aka Google's version of Twitch

As a kid, I spent hours on the living room couch playing video games with friends, taking turns trying to beat Ganon in "Ocarina of Time" and trading Pokemon until I had all 151. Soon controller passing and Game Boy link cables gave way to network multiplayer and PC LAN parties. Eventually, my living room became a virtual one, with a network of gamers sharing experiences and discoveries.

Today, the gaming world is much more diverse than the one I grew up with, and the community has created new formats that have made gaming more collaborative and interactive. On YouTube, gaming has spawned entirely new genres of videos, from let's plays, walkthroughs, and speedruns to cooking and music videos. Now, it's our turn to return the favor with something built just for gamers.

This summer, we'll launch YouTube Gaming, a brand new app and website to keep you connected to the games, players, and culture that matter to you, with videos, live streams, and the biggest community of gamers on the web—all in one place.

YouTube Gaming is built to be all about your favorite games and gamers, with more videos than anywhere else. From "Asteroids" to "Zelda," more than 25,000 games will each have their own page, a single place for all the best videos and live streams about that title. You'll also find channels from a wide array of game publishers and YouTube creators.

Keeping up with these games and channels is now super easy, too. Add a game to your collection for quick access whenever you want to check up on the latest videos. Subscribe to a channel, and you'll get a notification as soon as they start a live stream. Uncover new favorites with recommendations based on the games and channels you love. And when you want something specific, you can search with confidence, knowing that typing "call" will show you "Call of Duty" and not "Call Me Maybe."

Live streams bring the gaming community closer together, so we've put them front-and-center on the YouTube Gaming homepage. And in the coming weeks, we'll launch an improved live experience that makes it simpler to broadcast your gameplay to YouTube. On top of existing features like high frame rate streaming at 60fps, DVR, and automatically converting your stream into a YouTube video, we're redesigning our system so that you no longer need to schedule a live event ahead of time. We're also creating single link you can share for all your streams.

YouTube Gaming will be available this summer, starting in the U.S. and U.K. We're building this just for gamers; so we want to hear from you about how we can make it the best way to connect with your community. If you're at E3 next week, come by our booth for an early look at everything we've been working on. If not, tune in live from home at youtube.com/e3, head over to gaming.youtube.com and follow us @YouTubeGaming and you'll be the first to know when YouTube Gaming is ready for you to play with.

Alan Joyce, Product Manager, recently played "Final Fantasy XIV"

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Yeah it'll take a while to go worldwide but Youtube has the advantage with it's large Let's Play audience and being one of the most viewed websites on all of the internet. It'll take time but if they get it right no reason it wont over take Twitch. Youtube isn't exactly known for getting it right though... Google too.

They've tried many things with Youtube, all of which were half baked and no one remembers now... seriously the guys at Youtube are riding high on audience alone, they've done nothing but hurt Youtube in practice. It keeps growing simply because nothing else can compete with it's sheer numbers.

 

YouTube Gaming is now live - https://gaming.youtube.com/

 

Indeed, it will take time if ever for YouTube to catch up but at least now Twitch has hopefully real competition. If nothing else it should push Twitch to keep getting better.

 

YouTube may have more servers across the globe. They also have a lot more experience streaming video. It's using HTML5 instead of Flash, which could help a bit too.

 

Streaming to will be the same, en fact streaming to is determined largely by the program you use and your up bandwidth. The host only makes a difference for those viewing it. The only way it may help is if a server is closer to you but even then it'll only do any good if it wasn't a bandwidth problem in the first place.

 

Is that bits or bytes? If it's bits, it's about minimum-ish for probably 720p. Frame rate in the stream is usually caused by hardware, whats your specs?

 

Ah ok, well give it a shot and see how it goes.

 

Why not? It's YouTube, the biggest video site in the world by far. Too early to count them out.