San Francisco YouTube has unveiled a stand-alone gaming app as the Google-owned video site looks to challenge Amazon’s Twitch in the growing market for watching live streams of people playing video games.
YouTube Gaming pulls together all the gaming-related videos and livestreams from across the site, including material from YouTube star PewDiePie, who broadcasts his thoughts on video games to his channel’s almost 39m subscribers.
People are spending 75 per cent more time watching gaming videos on YouTube this year, compared with the year before, the company said, with half of the top 100 channels by watch time about gaming.
Frank Petterson, engineering manager, said the new app had more than 25,000 game pages and more gaming channels. “Together we all make gaming better,” he said. “Our peers make us better gamers, and games are made better by the communities that surround them.”
The trend of watching others play games online is part of a broader e-games phenomenon, where people even gather in their thousands at stadiums to watch people play computer games for significant prize money.
Gaming videos are worth $3.8 billion (Dh13.96 billion) worldwide according to estimates by SuperData Research. YouTube has 72 per cent of the viewers but Twitch, acquired by Amazon last year for $970 million, has the highest market share by revenue at 43 per cent, the research company said.
The app launch comes as YouTube is spinning off more specialist experiences for its more than 1bn viewers, to provide features applicable for watching games or for children on the site. YouTube Kids was the first stand-alone app launched earlier this year with only “family-friendly” content.
Robert Kyncl, Google vice-president and global head of business at YouTube, said the company was looking to create spin-off apps for areas with “meaningful consumer engagement” that could increase user watch time if they developed more specific features.
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“There are things that are great for gaming that on the rest of the content would clutter the user interface with unnecessary features,” he said.
Overall, hours watched on YouTube increased 60 per cent in the past year and the number of advertisers increased by 40 per cent, as marketers flocked to the site to try to target millennials who they struggle to reach using television.
Courtney Holt, chief strategy officer at Maker Studios, the Disney-owned multichannel networks that partners with more than 55,000 creators, said the rise of online video had created whole new types of content, from watching people play games to viewing people take toys out of their boxes.
“If somebody said 10 years ago that there would be a cable network whose entire purpose was primarily young boys talking over video game footage, that would have sounded pretty terrible,” he said. “But it is an incredible new business and form of self-expression, leveraging characters and animation to tell a new story.”
— Financial Times
