Newsletter
Back in June, Google officially announced they would be entering into the game streaming market with a dedicated website and service as well as an app for mobile devices called YouTube Gaming. At the time they hadn’t mentioned any sort of release date for YouTube gaming, but they did mention that it would be coming later on this Summer. Then back at the beginning of this month they launched the creator preview version of the app. It was discovered yesterday that Google would officially be launching YouTube Gaming today, and right on schedule as promised the app has appeared in the Play Store for all to download.
Streamers and viewers alike can now head to the Play Store or Google Play web page and install YouTube Gaming and begin checking out live streams of all their favorite video games. The actual YouTube Gaming web page itself is still not live, but there’s a good chance that since the app is up the web page could be live later today. You can however still visit the site to signup for notification via email about the website launch, and if you click on different sections of the heart you’ll notice some cool video game related animations.
With the launch of the YouTube Gaming service Google/YouTube will be aiming to take on Twitch, the current frontrunner in the game streaming market. With the YouTube Gaming app much of or all of the features and functions are the same as the creator preview. You have the app broken up into three separate tabs, games, feed, and my channels. Games will obviously be categorized by game in alphabetical order, while the feed will be a collection of different live streams and recordings currently happening, and the my channels tab will be where all the channels on YouTube Gaming that you subscribe to will be listed. One cool feature which may go unnoticed by some people is that you can import any of your gaming related channel subscriptions from YouTube into YouTube Gaming, eliminating any need to search for them again and re-subscribe in this new app.
A few other neat little features are the use of material design in the UI which adds a splash of color specific to each channel, and you can easily see when any channels are currently streaming live as there is a big button to display this much right towards the top of the page. The app doesn’t just feature live streams, it covers gaming related videos too, and instead of lumping them all in with YouTube and the collective of other video types there, YouTube Gaming is all about having them in one central spot in their own app to make finding what you want easier.
