A failed experiment on the part of YouTube to create a separate, stand-alone gaming app will finally be “game over”. The YouTube Gaming app will be shut down this week after they announced sometime last year that they will not be continuing with the app anymore since most people still go to the main YouTube app for their live streaming gaming fix. What they have done instead is to integrate the app’s features into a games-focused hub on YouTube itself.
Back in 2015, YouTube wanted to get in on the live streaming craze that was part of the gaming community. The YouTube Gaming app was supposedly something to improve the live stream experience and also to help them weed out the content that they didn’t like and just focus on gaming. They introduced features like channel membership, dark mode, and some that they wanted to test here and not on the main app.
Unfortunately, they eventually realized that users were still watching gaming videos on YouTube itself and didn’t want to download a separate app for that. They didn’t even really understand what YouTube Gaming is. And so they eventually decided to just launch a games-focused hub on the main app and incorporate some of the features to the core platform since gamers and game watchers are there anyway.
According to The Verge, the YouTube Gaming app will be officially shut down by May 30. Users are now being redirected to the gaming hub on YouTube. The YouTube and YouTube Gaming subscriptions have also been merged, although it looks like the list of games you’ve saved will not be carried over so you’ll have to start a new list once you’ve migrated there.
The gaming hub currently has more than 82 million subscribers which is probably more than the people who downloaded the soon-to-be-dead app.
