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Twitch is a video game live streaming platform owned by no other than Amazon.com, and since the service’s launch in 2011, millions of gamers have helped the platform to greatly expand and quickly become the go-to website for great quality video game live footage. In 2015, Twitch announced that it was receiving over 100 million unique visitors each month, making it the world’s most popular video game streaming website. Not so long ago, Google noticed how popular Twitch had become and decided to acquire the service, but after failing to do so, development began for its own video game streaming platform, called YouTube Gaming; which unlike Twitch, offers a wide variety of gaming-related videos including game trailers, compilations, and pre-recorded gaming sessions. YouTube Gaming was launched yesterday, and created a whole lot of commotion, as most reports have asked what would the new Google-owned platform mean for the future of the other video-game streaming services, such as Twitch. Well, according to Google itself, YouTube Gaming’s main goal is to fix the current fragmented overall experience that gamers all around the world have been suffering from, but the internet giant might have other things in mind.
YouTube Gaming’s launch will spark a great battle for the top position as a video platform designed for gamers, as Twitch will surely feel threatened by the ambitious new Google service. Twitch might not be in any danger soon, but a unified environment where gamers can watch videos of their favorite games or follow the many popular YouTube video game players, with live streaming capabilities implemented as a main feature of the platform could be troublesome down the line.
“Google certainly has the scale and resources that most companies can’t ever match, but that said, they’ve gotten into the augmented reality and social networking fields with Google Glass and Google+–and arguably have not wildly succeeded in crushing the incumbents” noted P. J. McNealy, founder of Digital World Research; in his statement, McNealy analyzed the other products that Google has launched tackling emergent technologies, or as a direct competitor to an already existing one. The reason behind this analogy, is that Twitch is already well established as the main video game live streaming service, which means that Google will have an arguably hard time competing with the service just like it did against Facebook when Google+ launched. Going against an already popular and well-developed platform is never a good idea if your service is still in an early development stage, but if Google is confident enough to release YouTube Gaming to compete with Twitch, it must have some great potential.