Imgur has launched Melee, a community-powered in-app platform for gamers.
Imgur reaches 300 million users a month with its focus on entertaining users with images that go viral. Many of Imgur’s users are gamers, and Melee lets them share highlights from their favorite players and esports events, find news and updates on their favorite games, discover new games and players, and enjoy entertaining gaming content.
This announcement represents a significant expansion for Imgur and is the most notable product launch since the company was founded in 2009.
“We know that Imgurians are passionate about gaming,” said Alan Schaaf, founder of Imgur, in a statement. “Gaming is one of the most popular topics on Imgur, with nearly half of our 300 million users follow gaming-related tags. We believe that Melee will provide an even richer experience for our existing community of gamers, while also presenting an opportunity to attract new audiences across the globe.”
Gaming is one of the fastest-growing industries worldwide. Recent data shows that we have more than 2.5 billion gamers all over the world, and the video game industry is expected to be worth over $90 billion by 2020.
And the demand for gaming content continues to grow; in 2017, Twitch viewers spent 355 billion hours watching videos on the platform.
Schaaf believes that Melee will help meet this demand.
As a dedicated platform for the gaming community to discover and discuss gaming topics, Melee will serve as a complementary product to current streaming platforms. Melee’s integrations with Twitch, for example, will enable the gaming community to more easily share and consume clips and content from live streams, and will give gamers another avenue for building their audiences and alerting fans when they begin streaming.
Melee launches today on iOS, with plans to expand to Android in the first quarter of 2020 and to desktop at a later date.