This week, straight outta the belly of Google is the YouTube Gaming app, a formal competitor to Twitch the popular live streaming service. If you have a console or a really nice PC that you use to play video games then you probably already heard about this app, but just in case you should still read on… YouTube Gaming is a place to go to find people that are streaming their video gaming live and commenting on their activity or whatever is on their mind.

Way to multitask, people! Bravo!

Seriously, with YouTube Gaming viewers can watch videos from more than 25,000 games. That means there are 24,998 more games out there that I know nothing about!

You mean there are more games out there than COD and Halo?

Interestingly enough when I connected to a few random live streams, mostly games I knew nothing about, in portrait view I saw the gamer’s video feed plus a comment/chat section underneath that I could jump into and interact with others about the current game play or topic being discussed. While in landscape mode I was able to watch streams in full screen.

YouTube Gaming, much like Twitch is a good place to find fresh content about the games you’re interested in, ones you’ve never heard of, but can fall in love with, and I’m sure ones you hate since there’s already so many users collected into this new view from YouTube.

The interface is very user friendly. There are big tiles when searching for content and you can even import channels that you may have subscribed to in YouTube that are tagged as gaming channels. We noticed a few streams had problems loading and not just their video was unable to load it seemed like their channel wouldn’t load possibly due to bandwidth issues on one or both sides of the pipe. I bet the dedicated gamers pay a premium to have more bandwidth available at home so they can stream live and play and surf the web in between matches.

Honestly, I’ve heard of Twitch, but until this app launched never had the motivation to tune into Twitch. Despite not having a dedicated gaming console of my own, I do occasionally watch the MLG YouTube channel for some COD action or a few other channels with COD play, Never have I just found random players with streams like I did with YouTube Gaming; some of which look very elaborate. I saw a gamer with a nice triple screen layout, a camera view from overhead, dedicated mic, a nice white throne to sit on and his front camera view overlaying the game play. His set up was so nice that I was coerced to stick around for a bit and watch him play.

If you play games on a console or PC and want to get better or just like want to review other players on games you’re familiar with then YouTube Gaming might be for you. Actually, like I mentioned above, I don’t have console anymore, but I still like to keep up with some of the gaming action too.

Download YouTube Gaming for Android