Read original story on: The Verge & Variety
The E3, (short for Electronic Entertainment Expo), the CES for the video gaming industry, is currently underway. All giants in the gaming industry and adjacent are coming out with big announcements, vying for the attention and wallets of all gamers worldwide. But on a smaller scale, a fight for eyeballs is also playing out between Amazon-backed Twitch and Google-owned YouTube, which we anticipated weeks ago.
Last Friday, YouTube timely announced the imminent launch of YouTube Gaming, a brand new app and website carting specifically to gamers with features that sound exactly like Twitch’s offerings. E3 offers YouTube a great opportunity to start gaining traction among the gaming community, and the leading online video site is a shiny new E3 hub, which features “a 12-hour live stream marathon” filled with gamer interviews, commentary from YouTube stars, as well as exclusive demos of the newly announced games.
As the de-facto streaming site for video gameplays, Twitch enjoys an inherent advantage given its audience demo and platform focus. Besides the standard wall-to-wall live coverage of the E3 events, it will also, for the first time, allow users to “co-stream” all of Twitch’s broadcasts from the convention, so as to broaden the reach of its user-generated content and enrich its streams. It will be interesting to see how Twitch holds up against YouTube’s attacks, especially considering Google was reportedly set to acquire Twitch for $1 billion before backing out due to alleged conflicts with YouTube.