YouTube Experiments with Streaming Video Game Playables
November 30, 2023
YouTube is following in Netflix’s footsteps as the latest streamer to expand into games. YouTube Premium subscribers on mobile and desktops will be able to access a suite of games it has branded “Playables.” A total of 37 mini-games can be found using the Explore tab for those who opt-in. Titles include “Angry Birds Showdown,” “Daily Solitaire,” “Brain Out,” and “Daily Crossword.” The streaming games don’t need to be downloaded or installed, but can be played directly from YouTube’s servers. YouTube says the games will initially be available through March 28, making the effort seem somewhat experimental.
“YouTube joins a long list of non-gaming tech companies that are trying to expand into games — often with mixed results,” reports The Verge, listing Google’s shuttering of Stadia in January and Amazon’s recent axing of 130 jobs in its free games division.
TikTok, which began teasing games in 2021, has since “been testing HTML5 mini-games with a handful of partners, including game developers Voodoo, Nitro Games, FRVR, Aimlabs and Lotum,” according to TechCrunch, which says what was once couched as a “major push” into games by parent ByteDance seems to have sputtered with this month’s announcement that it would be laying off around 1,000 games workers.
Other game dabblers include Meta Platforms, whose Instant Games experiment started about seven years ago. This month, Meta announced that it would be letting developers publish beta versions of their games on Facebook. “Netflix has been releasing games exclusively on mobile (the reviews of which are pretty mixed), and wants to expand into cloud games — though it’ll likely be a while until they’re available to the public,” per The Verge.
YouTube Playables “can be played on the YouTube app on Android, iOS, and Web,” writes Gadgets 360, which explains how to access and turn on the games. As for the limited nature of YouTube’s Playables rollout, Gadgets 360 says “the arcade service could later see a wider rollout to subscribers and add more premium games in the future, like the Netflix Games service.”
Google announced its YouTube Playables test feature back in September “for certain users,” writes Gizmodo, contextualizing that the expansion to all Premium users implies “early tests were not a complete bust.”
Global revenue for video games “was $193 billion in 2021, nearly double the revenue of the film industry at $100 billion,” Gizmodo says, noting that “the gaming industry is also growing significantly faster than the watching industry.” Every day, some 200 million people watch video games on YouTube, Gizmodo reports, adding that “now the company is trying to convert some of those viewers into players.”
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