Google kills its killer Twitch: the YouTube Gaming app stops this week

YouTube Gaming closes more or less this week. In response to Amazon's purchase of Twitch, Google launched the vertical market for the stand-alone YouTube game almost four years ago. On May 30, Google will stop the standalone YouTube Gaming app and the standalone gaming.youtube.com website.

The closure plan for the gaming portal was announced in September. A report from The Verge claimed that the site was dying because it was just not popular. YouTube broadcasts more than 50 billion hours of gaming content a year, but people just do not watch them through the site and game-specific apps.

Live streaming is one of the few forays of Google in the dominance of video on the web. Google attempted to buy Twitch.tv, the leader in video streaming in 2014, but the company was seized by Amazon. YouTube Gaming was launched a year later in the form, more or less, of a Twitch clone. YouTube Gaming has a very different interface to YouTube, just as Twitch is different from YouTube. Individual games have their own pages on YouTube Gaming that show all the YouTube content related to this game, and viewers can follow a game to receive all the latest content and discover new creators. Live streams have been heavily promoted as part of the gaming campaign, with a low latency streaming mode for better interaction with the cat. The site has also begun copying some of Twitch's monetization features, including "super chats" and paid-channel subscriptions.

YouTube Gaming has never been an alternative interface to YouTube's game content. This means that the death of standalone portals should not result in loss of content and that live streaming is still supported on YouTube.com. A support page details some of the changes users will face, such as merging YouTube Gaming and normal YouTube subscriptions. Users will also lose their list of tracked games, which are not supported on YouTube. Google directs former YouTube Gaming users to a YouTube game subpage on YouTube.com containing some of the untouched YouTube Gaming features, such as the live games list. On the web, the games section is on YouTube.com/gaming. You can find it in the classic YouTube app by pressing "Trends" and then "Games". Just like the standalone site, however, a normal person would have a hard time discovering these special interfaces.

YouTube Gaming seemed like a good idea at the time. Almost every streamer in the game has a YouTube channel – even those who invest heavily in Twitch – and with its own suite of live features, YouTube might be able to leave some of those people on its platform. This plan did not work with this plan, it's that Twitch benefits from social network effects: all content creators go to Twitch because that's where all the viewers are, and all the viewers go to Twitch because that's where all the content creators are. Neither party wants to jump to a new and empty social network.

Twitch also has its own appeal. The community has developed its own culture around the many emotes of the site, which have become their own abbreviated language at this stage. The site's games directory, which is sorted by current viewers, serves primarily as popularity rankings for the gaming sector.

YouTube Gaming was only one of the many vertical segments of YouTube launched by Google in recent years, all trying to extend the YouTube brand to another form of media. YouTube Gaming takes it from Twitch. YouTube Music is Google's Spotify competition. The original YouTube TV and YouTube Premium programming is an attempt by Netflix's competitors. There is also YouTube Kids, which tries (and often fails) to provide child-friendly video collections. YouTube Studio is for creators. Let's not forget, of course, the classic YouTube app.

YouTube Gaming can be added to Google's long list of closures in 2019. The company aggressively eliminates its range of services and this year has killed only Google+, Google Inbox, Google Allo, Chromecast Audio and many others. . Even Google Hangouts and Google Play Music should be closed soon.

All of these stops make it difficult to trust future products of the company, especially in new ecosystem games such as Google Stadia, Google's next cloud gaming service. For people skeptical about the longevity of Stadia, Google's stop of a game product barely a few months before the launch of Stadia will not change the ideas.