YouTube Gaming's Next Move Against Twitch? Mobile Game Streaming

Today, YouTube announced that it will soon allow players to livestream gameplay video directly from their phones to its Twitch competitor, YouTube Gaming.

The announcement comes on the opening day of the Tokyo Game Show, and seems tailored for Japan, a huge market for mobile games, and the first country in Asia to get YouTube Gaming after it launched last month in the United States and United Kingdom.

"Japan's mobile games define its gaming culture, far more so than in other countries," YouTube's global gaming head Ryan Wyatt said in a statement to The Verge. "This trend shows there's a real need for gamers to easily share what's on their screen with the gaming community, as it happens."

YouTube has a lot of catching to do on the huge gameplay livestreaming business, and allowing mobile players to easily livestream from Android, which is also developed by Google, could be a good place to compete with Twitch.

However, YouTube Gaming is far from the first player in this market.

Twitch announced a mobile broadcasting and capture solution in March 2014, and earlier this year partnered with Sony Mobile devices to make streaming from Android even easier.

Earlier this month, Mobcrush, another mobile game livestreaming platform, announced that it raised $11 from investors, and DeNA, the Japanese mobile gaming giant (and Nintendo's mobile games partner), announced Mirrativ the same day YouTube Gaming launched.