YouTube live-streaming coming to Android games near you
YouTube will soon enable direct live-streaming from within your favorite Android games, allowing friends to watch while you take down pigs in Angry Birds, construct new bases in Minecraft, and wreak havoc in Goat Simulator.
YouTube’s announcement, which was made at the Tokyo Game Show this week, comes less than a month after the company launched YouTube Gaming. The new platform hopes to take on Amazon-owned Twitch, and direct streaming from mobile could help it do that.
YouTube is hoping that the move will give YouTube Gaming a huge advantage in Japan — where YouTube Gaming will be available “soon” — where Twitch isn’t all that popular and mobile gaming is a massive trend.
“Japan’s mobile games define its gaming culture, far more so than in other countries,” said Ryan Wyatt, YouTube’s global head of gaming partnerships. This trend “shows there’s a real need for gamers to easily share what’s on their screen with the gaming community, as it happens.”
Twitch supports mobile games, too, but right now, only a limited number of titles are compatible. It won’t be too difficult for YouTube Gaming to better that, then, but it’s not yet clear whether the service will support any game you have installed, or whether developers will have to update their games to support YouTube streaming.
YouTube says direct game streaming from Android devices will be available “soon.”