The YouTube Gaming service is being discontinued. The experiment has failed. May 30 will be the last day, after which gaming content will fully return to normal YouTube. Rival Twitch saw this coming in 2015.
When is it over? The “YouTube Gaming” app will officially be discontinued on May 30. YouTube will transfer the subscriptions from YouTube Gaming to the main site.
However, the end has been known for a while.
What was YouTube Gaming? After Amazon acquired the streaming platform Twitch in 2014, Google wanted to catch up via YouTube and launched YouTube Gaming in 2015.
YouTube Gaming is essentially an alternative interface, structured similarly to Twitch.
At the top, the most popular games are displayed, and the player gets a selection of videos that the algorithm thinks will interest them.
As Mashable reports, YouTube has also used the area to try out some experiments.
Why didn’t it work? Interestingly, while gaming on YouTube is huge, in 2018 Fortnite dominated there, this YouTube Gaming never really could establish itself.
Apparently, the offering was simply not accepted; people used gaming content normally through YouTube.
This is the plan now: YouTube says it wants to continue working on providing a “strong home” for gamers, but this should now happen on YouTube, no longer separately on YouTube Gaming.
This is interesting as well: In June 2015, YouTube Gaming was announced with “A new player has entered the game.”
Subsequently, rival Twitch tweeted: “Welcome Player 2, add me on Google+, Kappa.”
That was already a sarcastic comment that was meant to illustrate that previous attempts by Google to jump on a moving train and challenge an established opponent had failed catastrophically.
Just as Google+ went down against Facebook, it seems now that YouTube Gaming has failed against Twitch.
