YouTube Gaming ups community-building tools with paid 'sponsorships'

Slowly but surely, YouTube’s gaming arm is becoming more Twitch-like and increasing its viability as a streaming platform. The online video giant has announced that it is bringing a handful of new features to YouTube Gaming in an effort to up engagement between creators and viewers.

Dubbed sponsorships, YouTube Gaming channels with over 1000 subscribers can now enable a suite of community-focused features like custom emoji and sponsors-only chat.

While this acts as a new form of income for habitual YouTube streamers, for game developers it serves to cement YouTube’s place as a still-growing and influential streaming platform.

The sponsorships feature is rolling out to YouTube Gaming first, and will likely trickle out to other corners of the video platform in some for following a small round of testing. The new feature also marks the end of a similar but mostly forgotten service called paid channels that YouTube said failed to catch on. 

More details on the benefits and stipulations for YouTube Gaming sponsorships can be found over on YouTube’s support section.