After allegedly failing to acquire Twitch, a video network for watching video game players play video games, YouTube has built its own and it’s set to go live on Wednesday, the company has confirmed.
YouTube announced in June that it was preparing get into the video game streaming business with its own Twitch competitor. Twitch, which spun-off from a previous video-broadcasting startup in 2007, ultimately sold to Amazon for about a $1 billion last year, making it clear that people not only like to play video games, but they also like to watch others play.
YouTube Gaming will launch at 10 a.m. Pacific on Wednesday, with 25,000 games to start, the company says. The English language version of the site will be available anywhere YouTube is accessible, and the iOS and Google Play apps will be rolling out in the U.S. And U.K. On Wednesday as well. More countries will be added soon.
Though Twitch undeniably put this phenomenon on the map, YouTube’s own users seem to have made a convincing case for the company to give them their own service. YouTube claims that it already has hundreds of millions of gamers, that people watch billions of hours of gaming on its service every month, which has gone up by 75% since last year, and that half of its top 100 channels by watchtime are about for gaming.
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