Earlier this year, YouTube Gaming was officially unveiled with plenty of noteworthy features to take on the in-house leader, Twitch, when it comes to video game streaming.

YouTube Gaming would eventually launch in August with those features in tow, offering a healthy alternative to Twitch, especially for those that wanted a new platform to grow with right out of the gate. One feature that YTG was missing, though, was a way for viewers to subscribe to their favorite streamers, like Twitch does. That is finally changing, though.

As originally reported by Ars Technica, YouTube Gaming has been updated to add “sponsorships” to its lineup of features. These are paid subscriptions to streamers, which are priced at $3.99 per month, and offer streamers in over 40 countries the ability to drop ads on their streams. The funds will be provided to streamers through Google Wallet.

For sponsoring a streamer, the viewer will get exclusive access to specific chat sessions, and they’ll have a badge next to their name while in chat to denote them as a sponsor. The big key difference between YouTube Gaming’s sponsorships and Twitch’s subscriptions is that the latter service only offers subscriptions for streamers with a set number of viewers. YTG, on the other hand, has no plans to relegate sponsorships to a certain amount of viewers for a channel.

The one catch: sponsorships are only available, for now, for beta testers.

It’s also worth noting that Google says that “The majority of the Sponsorships split is given to the creator,” which sounds like it’s better than the half-and-half deal provided to Twitch streamers. However, Google wouldn’t open up about specifics regarding how much of the sponsorship goes to the streamer.

And, finally, for Android device users that want to stream games from the device, that’s now possible thanks to a new update to the YouTube Gaming app. A link to the app is available below.

Have you checked out YouTube Gaming yet?

Download:

• YouTube Gaming — Free