Live streaming has changed the gaming landscape in many ways. It's caused many online personalities to blow up overnight and is often cited as a possible nail in the coffin for singleplayer games. Twitch is well known as the top dog when it comes to live streaming platforms, but others, like Microsoft's Mixer, have existed for almost as long. YouTube's answer to Twitch, however, will reportedly be retired in March of 2019.

The company announced that it would shut down their dedicated gaming platform in a post uploaded to the official blog earlier today. Originally launched in 2015, the website was intended as a competitor to Twitch. While bringing many different innovative features, YouTube Gaming failed to garner a large enough audience to justify its continued support.

YouTube will instead offer a new home for fans of live streamed content, youtube.com/gaming. The new page will still include many of the features fans enjoyed from the original app as well as bringing some impressive new features based around community engagement and discovering new content creators.

Still, whether or not YouTube will ever be able to compete with Twitch in a meaningful way is a big question. At the time of this writing, Fortnite is clocking 80,000 views on YouTube Gaming while Twitch is pulling in a much more impressive 140,000 concurrent views. While there are many factors that could be affecting the views, including how new the YouTube page is, it's obvious that YouTube still has a long ways to go if they wish to grab a bigger portion of the gaming audience.

YouTube has been in the news a lot over the last few years in large part due to growing pains. They have a history of regularly putting copyright abusers ahead of actual content creators for fear of legal action being taken against them. While not all of the fears are unfounded, many of the platform's creators have expressed their desire to find alternative ways to reach their audiences. YouTube is currently in uncharted waters for the entertainment industry, but the changes to the platform have been frustrating for almost everyone involved. Hopefully, youtube.com/gaming will prove to be a step in the right direction.