The standalone YouTube Gaming app is essentially being absorbed into YouTube

YouTube is reworking the video game focused side of its platform to address some of the discoverability issues that crept up since its launch of YouTube Gaming in 2015.

The company detailed some of those coming changes in a recent blog post, noting that many of the features found in the standalone YouTube Gaming app are headed to the main YouTube, but that the app itself is being retired in March 2019.

Speaking with Polygon, YouTube Gaming head Ryan Wyatt explained that the standalone app made it difficult for creators to grab the attention of new people since many of those potential viewers were browsing for content on YouTube proper rather than the YouTube Gaming app. 

“The problem is, if you didn’t have the app, or you weren’t using the gaming hub to kind of like discover this content, creators weren’t as discoverable,” Wyatt told Polygon. “So many of these users are just using YouTube and the regular YouTube experience. You’d have some people that funneled through into the gaming app, or the gaming destination, but we were finding we still weren’t touching many people daily.”

Going forward, YouTube users can access a video game focused hub on YouTube that sorts streams and video content by top games, top streams, and other criteria. The new features are already live for those in the US and will roll out to other countries in the future.