YouTube Gaming Set To Launch Sometime This Summer As New Service Will Allow Gamers To Share Their Content Just Like Twitch!

In a bid to compete with Amazon-owned streaming service Twitch, video-sharing website, YouTube will launch a dedicated site and app for gaming.

Twitch enables gamers to watch and interact with live broadcasts of others playing games. The Web giant which own YouTube is believed to have made a bid for Twitch last year, however it was beaten by Amazon's $970m (£620m) offer.

Google said the service would launch later this summer. 

"On YouTube, gaming has spawned entirely new genres of videos, from let's plays, walkthroughs, and speedruns to cooking and music videos. Now, it's our turn to return the favour with something built just for gamers," YouTube Gaming product manager Alan Joyce said in a blog post.

The Let's Play trend turned out to be extremely popular. Channels that demonstrate how to build environments in "sandbox" game Minecraft command views into the hundreds of millions.

YouTube shares advertising revenue with the broadcaster and just like Twitch, YouTube also allows for a "tip jar" function for viewers to send money to the broadcaster, BBC noted.

YouTube Gaming will offer an area on YouTube separated from the rest so that "when you want something specific, you can search with confidence, knowing that typing "call" will show you "Call of Duty" and not "Call Me Maybe," Joyce added.

YouTube Gaming is expected to consist of 25,000 individual game portals which bring together all the activity around each title on a single page.

The search engine giant will be looking forward to the new services attracting gamers away from rival Twitch which currently controls the market for live online broadcasting. Almost 12 billion hours of live gaming are watched on the site every month.

Steam Broadcasting, on the other hand carters to PC gamers but is not as popular as Twitch.

YouTube Gaming will reportedly launch initially in the US and UK.