YouTube established itself as a direct competitor to Twitch with the launch of YouTube Gaming, a standalone app built for video game and livestreaming content. Now, three years after its launch, YouTube Gaming is shutting down, with many of its features moving to the original YouTube platform. However, gaming will remain a heavy focus for YouTube, and the video site is already positioning itself to take another swing at Twitch.

The company will officially retire the YouTube Gaming in March 2019. The blog post announcing the closure pointed out that while the platform had its own audience audience, there is potential to reach more gamers on the main site. The platform offered a number of streamer-friendly features including::

Game Pages, which act as landing pages for content on specific games,

Super Chat, a new feature letting users pay to pin comments on livestreams,

Various improvements to YouTube’s streaming service as a whole.

In place of a separate gaming app, YouTube has built a new landing page within its main platform.. Features from YouTube Gaming will be mixed in with new features designed to personalize the experience within the gaming section.

Users can “favorite” specific games, which YouTube will use to curate its recommendations for gaming content. The key feature of the new gaming section is “On The Rise”— a way for YouTube to highlight small gaming creators. The platform will promote a new up and coming gaming creator every week, showcasing their content to its massive videogame enthusiast audience.

[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]”YouTube’s introduction of channel memberships is already helping gaming creators monetize their content.“[/perfectpullquote]

YouTube’s introduction of channel memberships, a feature similar to Twitch’s subscriptions, is already helping gaming creators monetize their content. Creators get paid from memberships and can offer members-only perks like badges, emojis, and other virtual goods. These channel memberships have now been implemented throughout the site, with content creators requiring at least a 50K subscriber count, and YouTube Partner status. For gaming, the requirements are drastically less, with creators only needing 1K subscribers to take part in memberships.

The change in YouTube’s strategy does two things; it lets the platform lean more on its huge gaming video offering and the algorithm’s ability to pinpoint relevant content, and it entices potential creators to join the platform through features similar to Twitch and better discoverability.

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For many content creators, Twitch and YouTube work together as two pieces of their distribution strategy. Streamers often host gaming content on YouTube after it has been livestreamed on Twitch. Because of this, YouTube Gaming had a hard time breaking Twitch’s stronghold on live streaming despite having several creator-friendly features.. The new changes create a more fluid environment for YouTube’s live streaming content as users will no longer have to jump between the main site and YouTube Gaming. As users discover new gaming videos, the hope for the company is that they will find new live streaming content as well, instead of looking for that content elsewhere.

But to keep users from searching for live streaming content in other places, YouTube needs to bolster its content offerings on the site. This is where “On The Rise” comes into play. Twitch has a large number of smaller content creators competing for viewership on the site. The platform lacks necessary tools for these streamers to effectively promote themselves. As a result, some of them have migrated to other streaming services with less direct competition. Like Facebook Gaming’s “Gaming Creator Pilot Program,” “On The Rise” is working to raise the visibility of smaller gaming creators in hopes that they find success and stay on YouTube.

YouTube still has a difficult task ahead if it wishes to usurp Twitch as the top livestreaming platform. Aligning its gaming community with its vast audience is a good start, but it will have to continue to build meaningful partnerships with both esports rights holders and popular streamers to take down the streaming giant.