By Todd Russell
Google quietly released YouTube Playables (https://www.youtube.com/playables), their free gaming portal, on May 24, 2024.
We didn’t report on it back then, but recently PGM member Gamer_Nix brought it up in the Discord, asking if anybody else was playing any of these games, of which crickets replied.
Admittedly, I hadn’t realized YouTube had games like Netflix (see Netflix Love Is Blind Stories Mobile Game Launches September 19, 2023 and Netflix Starts Limited Testing Cloud Streaming Games In Canada and UK). It’s just not what we think of when thinking of YouTube or Netflix (movies and TV shows). YouTube name is all about videos, mostly user-created. They have a lot of music videos, like a modern MTV. YouTube is the biggest video site in the world.
If you said games with Twitch, I’d think streamers playing games and it’s probably the same reason that Amazon put their gaming portal under https://gaming.amazon.com/home instead of Twitch, although it would have made sense to put it under Twitch and even better to integrate so that we could play their featured games. Amazon should offer that to streamers as an option, right?
Anyway, here’s what Google/YouTube had to say themselves roughly a year ago:
“Noticed anything different on YouTube lately? Over the past few months, a limited number of users in select markets have been testing a new feature called Playables — a collection of free games you can play directly on the platform. You’ll soon start to see them on your YouTube app.” – Playables are now on YouTube – YouTube Blog
After Gamer_Nix mentioned this, I decided to pull up YouTube Playables on my phone and try out a game called Bubble Tower.
Sort of a generic clone of Bust-A-Move. Not bad, not great. I think that’s the problem with most clone games, they’re clones. I’m sure there’s probably a Flappy Bird clone on there like Flying Tickets (Down The Flappy Bird Clone Games Hole). It’s not like these games aren’t casual fun here and there, some of them might even be really fun, I just don’t seek them out very often and wonder how many others do.
They are the perfect type of free games that fit what we tend to highlight on Sunday free game spotlight here at PGM, in fact like: Play Browser-Based Games FREE on MSN Games.
Anybody here played YouTube Playables? Did you, like this author, completely miss YouTube was even doing this? 75+ games at launch, no idea exactly how many games they have there now but a rough count scroll of 33 rows of 5 across means something like 160 or so games. I saw a Pac-Man branded arcade game icon in there.
Yeah, With 270,000+ games, Gamers are hopelessly outnumbered. I bet there’s something fun in the mix here, so readers please, if you’ve checked this out or do at some point and find a nugget in the slushpile, throw us a bone in the comments.