YouTube Launches a Rival to Twitch
The company's announcement of YouTube Gaming shows, for better or worse, that we are living in a golden age of watching other people play video games
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Last year, Google flirted with buying Twitch, the live-streaming site for gamers. The romance never took, and Twitch shacked up with Amazon. Today, with its unveiling of a new project called YouTube Gaming, Google turns to a special corner of the broader site that bears a striking resemblance to Twitch. If you can’t buy it, build it (or a reasonable facsimile of it).
At an event in Los Angeles, Ryan Wyatt, the head of gaming for YouTube, said the site was arguably the best one for gaming on the Internet. "But to be honest, not everybody out there sees it that way," he added.