Today Google announced, it’s YouTube Gaming, replacing it with a page on the main site. The new Gaming experience looks fairly similar to the previous site. The company is hoping that the Gaming page, while not very dissimilar to the Gaming site, will help bring more viewers and content creators together now that they aren’t being forced to shuffle between two sites. The Gaming portal today launched in the US, and it’s rolling out to other countries in the coming weeks. To find it, check the left sidebar and scroll all the way down to the bottom. The YouTube Gaming app will officially disappear off the market in March 2019.
It also shows you videos from subscribed gaming channels and allows you to set reminders for upcoming live streams on your Google Calendar. In an astounding display of frankness, YouTube has admitted its separate Gaming experiment hasn’t yielded any benefits for either the content creators or the viewers for whom it was intended: “We have a strong and vibrant audience on the YouTube Gaming app, but the number of gamers we are able to reach is far bigger on YouTube.” Ryan Wyatt, head of YouTube Gaming, told Polygon the app just wasn’t pulling in the audience it was intended to, mostly because users would default to basic YouTube.
The differences between the two aren’t that noticeable. There’s a section for “On the Rise” creators, which will show both in Gaming and on the Trending page.
You’d have some people that funneled through into the gaming app, or the gaming destination, but we were finding we still weren’t touching many people daily. If I were to be really picky when it comes to the design, I’d say it’s less Twitch-lite and more YouTube, but it’s otherwise not that noticeable of a difference.
