Variety reported yesterday about a possible purchase of the videogame streaming company Twitch for the cost of $1 Billion dollars in order to merge it with YouTube. This came to be by "sources familiar with the pact" according to the Variety article.
Twitch on its own has become an integral part of all three of the current generation of consoles with the Wii U lacking it being built in while the Xbox One and Playstation 4 now have them as live options for gamers to share what they are playing with the world. It has become one of the ways many people will either come together to enjoy a particular title or series, get an inside look at a game to help them decide if it is worth their money, or to just enjoy seeing others play and discovering titles.
But it is not happening just yet, as this kind of merger will likely come under the scrutiny of the Justice Department to find out if the grab for Twitch would make YouTube (and thus Google) a possible anticompetitive fource in the online streaming world.
So if this goes through, what do you think will happen to Twitch and the more than 45 million viewers and over 1 million video content creators? Will there be great new features now that Twitch may have access to the Google wallet, or will we see the slow tumble of the service like we have with YouTube where Google+ becomes required, real names are forced, accounts split, and copyright claims could be slapped onto a streamer in real time? I know I sound negative about this, but I can see many more things going wrong with this than right sadly. But who knows...this hasn't even been confirmed yet.
Source Link: Variety