After a little more than a month of waiting, Google has finally launched its much-anticipated Twitch competitor, YouTube Gaming, a web and mobile platform that gathers all of YouTube’s thousands and thousands of hours of gaming content in one neat package. The platform is brand new, featuring an interface unlike anything else on YouTube right now, so here are a few tips to get you started.

Accessing YouTube Gaming

You can get to the new YouTube Gaming platform either by downloading the mobile app from iTunes or Google Play or by visiting the site at gaming.youtube.com.

As with the standard YouTube site, you log in using your Google account, and you can still choose which YouTube account you want to use if you have more than one (for example, if you have a public channel and a personal account).

Choose your Channels and Games

YouTube Gaming starts you out with a blank slate, but the service makes it easy to pull in all of your gaming related YouTube subscriptions so you can jumpstart your content right out of the box. To do this, simply choose the “Channels” tab on YouTube Gaming and you will be prompted to select the subscriptions you want to import.

You can also browse through a list of featured popular channels, and adding them to your subscriptions is as easy as tapping or clicking the star icons next to the channel name.

While following your favorite channels is great, it is not very different from the standard YouTube site. What sets YouTube Gaming apart is its ability to let you discover new content you wouldn’t normally see.

For example, the “Games” tab works almost the same way as Channels, but it allows you to follow specific games, letting you discover new content related to your favorite games without having to subscribe to specific channels.

You can also visit content portals for certain games by searching for them, such as the League of Legends page. These portals include information about the game, as well as tabs for different categories of content, including current live streams of the game, Let’s Plays, and reviews. Most of the portals also include a tab for the game’s developer, making it easy to find official content from studios like Riot Games or Blizzard Entertainment.

Screenshots via YouTube Gaming