YouTube Gaming Tries To Step Over Twitch

If you can't join 'em, beat 'em. After failing to acquire video game streaming site Twitch last year, Google has constructed a rival service — YouTube Gaming.

Gaming has proven a big deal for YouTube. Videos about the popular brick building game “Minecraft” are the most popular in the site’s history with over 42 million videos on the site.

And one of its most popular users, Felix Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie, has over 37 million subscribers who tune into his gaming videos. The Wall Street Journal reports he generated $4 million in ad revenue last year alone.

Everyone knows YouTube has their sights firmly set on Twitch with this move. There were rumors Google was trying to buy out the company last year but Amazon beat them to it with a $970 million deal.

That ridiculous-sounding dollar amount comes from the 100 million users the site attracts each month. Their audience includes that highly coveted advertising demographic of young and male.

And so if Google can't just scoop up the existing competition, it's content to build its own platform.

Their new site will be able to live stream games at 60 frames per second, which is important to show modern graphics at their best.

It will also feature all the channels of archived video found on YouTube now in addition to specific pages dedicated to a game.  

So the site sounds like it has everything Twitch has and then some. But the company doesn’t seem to be worried, tweeting this dig at Google+ on Friday.

Twitch does have the advantage of established streamers on its side, who probably won’t want to leave a platform on which they are already generating ad revenue.