YouTube has rolled out public testing of its new “Playables” content with select users. We first reported that this was coming to the video streaming platform a few months back, when it was being tested internally.
Thus far it appears that these Playables will be fairly simple mini games as with arcade puzzle game Stack Bounce. So don’t expect to go playing the next Call of Duty straight from YouTube anytime soon.
Of course YouTube is hardly the first big social media site to take a foray into gaming. TikTok and Facebook have game offerings as well, and Netflix is going all-in on offering mobile games on its platform. Netflix is even introducing a way for users to play on the TV and has begun testing its very own cloud gaming service.
This Playables initiative comes after the failure of Google’s Stadia cloud gaming platform, which was discontinued a year ago. As per the latest post on Google.com’s support section,
We’re starting to test a new experience on YouTube called “Playables”. Playables are games that can be played directly on YouTube on both desktop and mobile devices. If you’re part of this experiment, you’ll see a section on YouTube called “Playables” that will appear alongside other content on the home feed. We’re testing this with a limited number of users to start. You can view and control your Playables history and saved game progress in YouTube History.
It’s evident that entities like YouTube and Netflix are making a push to diversify their offerings as revenues begin to dip for those respective platforms. That said, so far it looks like YouTube’s efforts are much less ambitious compared to what Netflix is doing right now.
Via The Verge.
Featured image via The Esports Observer.