In June 2015, YouTube announced a dedicated app and website for gaming. The reason was not that games were a small corner of video; gaming had already created its own formats, from Let’s Plays and walkthroughs to speedruns and live broadcasts.
YouTube Gaming promised a page for each favorite game, with videos and live streams gathered around the title. The launch announcement said more than 25,000 games would have their own pages, giving a viewer a way to follow a game rather than search the whole platform from scratch.
The product was also a testing ground for features that later moved into the main YouTube experience. Game discovery, easier live broadcasting, 60fps streaming, DVR, and a single shareable link all treated live video as something that could be organized and revisited, not merely watched once.
In 2018, YouTube said the gaming community had helped build a destination for more than 200 million daily gaming viewers and over 50 billion hours of gaming content in the previous year. It also explained that features from the standalone app had proved useful enough to bring back to YouTube itself.
The standalone app eventually gave way to a broader gaming destination on YouTube. That transition tells a familiar platform story: a separate room can be useful for experiments, but the winning features often return to the larger house where the whole audience already lives.