YouTube Targets Twitch With YouTube Gaming, A New Service That Will Launch This Summer

Amazon's Twitch gaming service has a new challenger: YouTube Gaming, a service announced Friday by YouTube that will debut this summer on the Web and as an app for Android and iOS devices.

With YouTube Gaming, Google is creating a niche version of YouTube that is specifically focused on gaming. The service will include pages dedicated to specific games that users will be able to follow, and each page will include videos, channels and live streams focused on those games. At launch, YouTube Gaming will include pages for more than 25,000 games.

"YouTube Gaming is built to be all about your favorite games and gamers, with more videos than anywhere else," YouTube said Friday in a blog post.

Additionally, YouTube said it will launch an improved version of its live-streaming features some time in the next few weeks. The improvements will let users broadcast live streams without having to schedule them ahead of time, and they will be able to use a single link for each of their streams, making it easier for viewers to tune in without needing to find a new link each time a stream kicks off.

YouTube Gaming is Google's effort to compete with Twitch, a video service focused on games where many users go to watch live video of other gamers. Google unsuccessfully tried to acquire Twitch last year before losing out to Amazon, which acquired the service for $970 million.

Since it couldn't purchase Twitch, Google is now trying to build its own version of it in YouTube Gaming, but already the service is off to a rocky start. Earlier Friday, the main link to the service pulled up an error page, showing that YouTube Gaming had crashed under the heavy traffic it received following its announcement.

News of the site was first reported by the Daily Dot in March.