According to the unconfirmed reports, Google has closed a $1bn deal to buy a gaming video streaming website Twitch. The latter is supposed to help YouTube attract a hardcore group of users to the dominant video platform and tap into the rising gaming trend.

The acquisition, first reported three months ago, would be the biggest by the tech giant since it acquired YouTube in 2006. Twitch would allow Google to access the rapidly expanding gaming user base of 45 million monthly users watching 106 minutes of video per day on average.

In simple words, Twitch is a kind of YouTube for live gaming: the users broadcast themselves playing and/or talking about games while others watch them (live or recorded) while discussing it. The website allows gamers to stream live gameplay videos from desktop PCs, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles.

Twitch’s ease of use has lead to millions of dedicated users per month logging on and watching hours of video – this is what Google certainly finds attractive. In addition, YouTube and Twitch are both benefiting from people going online to watch other people playing. It is a known fact that different gaming channels are hugely popular on YouTube. This makes gaming one of YouTube’s most popular genres alongside music. Thus, acquisition of Twitch would shore up that status and grant YouTube the status of the number one platform for e-sports, as well as the huge audience to advertise to.

Story of the 3-year-old Twitch is classic: it emerged in the right place at the right time with a good platform, and Internet users did the rest. The platform’s appeal to its core audience is that it gets the mood right and feels like an extension of themselves instead of a large corporate entity.

There is an interesting phenomenon Twitch features: it has played host to some of gaming’s biggest live hits like “Twitch plays Pokemon”. The latter saw more than 100,000 players simultaneously play a game of Nintendo’s classic Pokemon attracting 55 million views. This was half art project and half reality show – Pokémon Red, the 1996 Game Boy hit ran on an emulator hooked up to Twitch. The project allowed viewers to enter button commands in the chat window, and they got passed onto the emulator, which entered them in order. Although it did not quite work out like intended with 1,000s of users trying to control the action and each level taking ages to pass through, it still showed that a new kind of entertainment could prove very popular indeed.