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Facebook is taking on Amazon's wildly successful live video game streaming service

Facebook is taking on Amazon's wildly successful live video game streaming service

world of warcraft

Blizzard Games

A scene from World of Warcraft

Facebook is diving into a big new market: Live video game streaming.

Soon, people playing Blizzard Entertainment games like the super-popular "World of Warcraft" and recent hit "Overwatch" will be able to easily "Go Live" to stream their experience onto Facebook.

eSports and video game streaming has long been ruled by Twitch, which Amazon bought for $970 million in 2014. Google-owned YouTube threw its hat in the ring last summer, too, with its own dedicated app for video game livestreaming.

People love watching other people play video games, a phenomenon which has flushed ad revenue to gamers and their streaming platforms alike, and this move shows that Facebook wants in on the action.

Twitch has built a community of hardcore streamers, but they may be tempted to try out Facebook simply for its enormous scale, which could help them pull in new audiences.

That's Facebook's secret sauce when it comes to Live video, generally: It has 1.65 billion users browsing the network every month who can stumble into watching Live video after they seeing it on their feed. Facebook doesn't need to become known as a destination for video game streaming to be successful, it just needs to prove to gamers that they can reach big crowds and make good money.

Although Blizzard marks the first video-game integration for Facebook - both Twitch and YouTube let users stream a bunch of games - we could see more down the line.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.

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