After the death of Google Stadia, the company is again looking at video games… but why does Alphabet (Google’s parent company) bother?

YouTube has many features that used to be popular and disappeared (like annotations…), but it has also failed with subscription-only series (Originals). Now, they are trying their hand at games. A feature called Playables is available to a limited number of users. If you’re lucky (plus you’re using the site with a Premium subscription instead of an ad-blocker…), you may come across this new feature on the main site.

9to5Google wrote about one of YouTube’s tested features and experiments. Premium users have access to these, but you could hear about the mini-games last year because they were being tested internally… in the meantime, it’s almost certain that the S-word was not being used because by then, it was official that Stadia was in its last moments before obsolescence. But now, it’s interesting that this innovation has only quietly emerged…

Google Stadia was a significant embarrassment for the company, but the gaming expansion has emerged almost in secret. “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,” YouTube wrote.

One has to think of small games similar to Stack Bounce, which is presumably YouTube’s way of attracting the attention of the younger generation since the short videos (Shorts) also follow the example of ByteDance’s TikTok. The only question is how Playables will open its doors to developers, immediately leading to monetization, as YouTube has been leaning strongly in that direction over the last decade.

Perhaps it’s understandable what ex-PlayStation boss Shawn Layden had in mind when he feared the industry from the expansion of non-gaming companies…

Source: PCGamer