YouTube Gaming Vs. Twitch

Can brand name alone defeat a head start?

Google is always a fascinating company to study, powerful, driven, and unafraid to take risks. Many of these risks have paid off in spades and others have failed horribly. Here’s to you Google Glass.

They have even gone so far to try and overcome competition in a market that they were not currently in, such as Google+ attempting to compete with Facebook.

The Google+ attempt was fascinating to watch as users flocked to it and then immediately abandoned it. This was demonstrative of the power that the Google brand has for attraction.  However, in the end, users were not converted to a permanent base.

In a similar move, Google is now going after the video game streaming industry with YouTube Gaming.

The video game streaming market has, until now, been cornered by Twitch.Tv. If you are unfamiliar with it, the site allows for people to broadcast their computer or video game screen to a live stream on the site where people can watch them play video games. These livestreams, which can be watched on various devices, are often accompanied with a webcam on the player who interacts with viewers that are chatting at them. At its voyeuristic core, people are watching people play video games.

The system is monetized by selling advertising both as a pre-roll to a live stream or throughout as ad breaks. Not to ever be dethroned as king of the internet, Google launched YouTube Gaming yesterday as a direct competition.

YouTube Gaming mimics the functionality of Twitch with additional value of auto caching and integration with YouTube itself. Additionally, it has a 4 hour buffer that allows for re-wind and replay of live streams during viewing. The launch was met with a lot of buzz pertaining to how it will compete with the Amazon owned Twitch.

Over the years, Twitch has successfully built its brand, user base, and following. When it was sold to Amazon for $970 million, Amazon left the brand untouched and allowed the community to continue to grow and thrive.

YouTube Gaming has been met with a decent launch thus far; obviously people know and trust the Google brand. However, there has not been the massive migration that was expected in the first 24 hours of the launch.

Time will tell if people will flock to YouTube Gaming over Twitch. We will have to see if branding can indeed carry this massive undertaking to successfully compete with an established competitor.