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YouTube to Buy Twitch Game Streaming Company for $1 Billion

Take the biggest video network on the planet. Add the biggest live streaming video game site on the planet. Cue world domination.

If you’re a gamer, odds are that you’ve uploaded or at least watched video of others playing your favorite games either live or pre-recorded. It’s as engaging as any sports event, except lots of stuff usually gets blown up and no one gets fired for making extremely racist remarks (usually). YouTube’s $1 billion dollar bid puts the video at the top of the video programming heap. The video game streaming world is huge, especially when it comes to massive annual tournaments that pit top gamers against each other for big prize money.

According to Variety, the idea of Google-owned YouTube, already the biggest video sharing site in the world, becoming bigger might not sit well with the government regulators looking for the next big monopoly to take down (that isn’t implicitly already owned by them). Considering that YouTube serves up more than 6 billion hours of video per month to over 1 billion users around the globe, adding a company with reportedly 45 million views per month and over 1 million members, it’s bound to make the antitrust people a little antsy.

But for gamers, this could mean big changes in the world of professional gaming and how we view video games as not just a first person form of entertainment. Sure, hardcore gaming fans already watch a lot of live events, but YouTube could possibly make it into a mainstream spectator sport.

What do you think? Is the acquisition of Twitch by YouTube a good thing or a bad thing?

Image: Twitch

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