Google's striving to make its services more stream-friendly with Youtube Gaming, a new games-centric site launched today. Designed as a direct competitor to Twitch, it puts streaming front and center while also functioning as a new launchpad for the extensive Let's Play and general gaming library already on YouTube. I've been spending some time with the new set-up, and it's pretty nice. Twitch might have its work cut out for it.
YouTube's been looking to break Twitch's near-monopoly on videogame streaming for a while. When Twitch was up for sale last year, one of the major rumors was that Google would be the buyer. Instead, when Amazon picked Twitch up for a whopping $970 million, Google started grooming YouTube to compete directly with the service, bolstering its streaming capabilities and offering the ability to upload videos running at sixty frames per second.
Now, that groundwork might have a chance to pay off. YouTube Gaming's design ethos seems to be "like Twitch, but better." It's smoother, cleaner, and more pleasant to use. Colored in a Steam-reminiscent charcoal, to make us games folk feel at home I suppose, the interface is dense but responsive, compactly offering the same sort of information you'd find on Twitch.
It's a lot easier on the eyes, though, especially because YouTube doesn't have to rely on constant, massive ads filling up the background.
The improvements on Twitch's model are nowhere more evident than in the video player itself, which has the distinction of actually working. I've long had a contentious relationship with Twitch's video player, which runs on Adobe Flash, known in ancient tomes as the Bandwidth Devourer. Even on fast internet connections, Twitch stutters and crashes often. YouTube Gaming benefits from Google's years spent honing its own proprietary player, which runs on a much lighter HTML5 backend. In my experience, streams are fast and reliable.
YouTube Gaming has one more leg up on Twitch: the years of videogame-related videos already on the service. Old videos play seamlessly in the same player format as the streams, minus the live chat, and are now searchable by game.
All in all, this new service feels really slick. Google's plan seems to be to just pull Twitch's audience out from under them, creating a platform that does the same thing more effectively, building on the already massive YouTube community in the process. And, frankly, with it running this well at launch, Twitch should be worried.
