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Bloomberg
YouTube secured the exclusive rights to broadcast some of the biggest esports leagues, giving Google a boost in its efforts to push into the lucrative world of video games.
The deal, signed between Alphabet Inc’s Google and video game publisher Activision Blizzard Inc, gives YouTube the rights to broadcast the new Call of Duty League and the already-popular Overwatch League, which was broadcast on Amazon.com Inc’s Twitch for the past two years at a reported cost of $90 million. As part of the agreement, Google will provide cloud infrastructure for Activision’s online games. Financial terms of the multiyear deal were not disclosed. Gaming is a significant new frontier for Google. Last year, it released a game streaming service called Stadia, which lets people play games through the internet without having to buy a console or high-powered computer. YouTube has always been a major destination for watching people play video games, but company is trying to take even more territory by poaching well-known game players from Twitch.
“In 2020 Google is going all out to claim a piece of the $120 billion games market,†said Joost van Dreunen, managing director of Nielsen’s video-game research arm.