Sources are claiming that the Google owned company, YouTube, is close to closing a deal with Twitch worth $1 billion. The popular company, which has made it’s niche in the gaming community as the website of choice to livestream gameplay video, has experienced huge growth in the last few years, and has sparked a new market of gamers watching others play games. According to Variety, the sale is already sealed, and they say the official announcement is coming in the next few days. The deal makes perfect sense for YouTube, as live streaming games is not a part of their online-video offerings.
With competitiv games like League of Legends, gamers have started to watch other gamers to learn from their playstyles. Also, watching other casual games like Minecraft allows users to showcase their creations. While YouTube is the king of videos, currently it’s live streaming options are mostly unused, especially in the area of gaming. Including the demographic of the thousands of gamers who want to watch each other game will let them sell even more ads. Twitch sees a great ability to target these gamers, even greater than the abilities of Amazon or Facebook, and Google could help build out infrastructure to support all these viewers.
While it’s still too early to know what Google is going to do with Twitch, we can hope that they will keep it as a separate site and company. Many users have cried foul saying Google will merge Twitch and YouTube together to make YouTube an even bigger video power house, but I think they are buying the company for the brand along with a great place to live stream then save the recorded video on YouTube.
Tell us what you think about YouTube reportedly buying Twitch for $1 billion. Also tell us if you enjoy watching gamers live streaming on Twitch!