Google takes another shot at gaming, brings Playables to YouTube

YouTube Playables

Last year, Google announced Playables, a gaming service which was kind of a pilot run and limited to only Premium subscribers. Now, the company has announced that Playables will be available to all YouTube users. Playables are games that can be played directly on YouTube on both desktop and mobile devices. “After testing Playables with a limited group of users, we’re expanding this experiment to more users in the US, Great Britain, Canada & Australia,” said Google. Google said that users will soon start to see them on the YouTube app.

Users can head to the main YouTube Home page, either on desktop or the iOS and Android app and find Playables from the Explore menu. They can choose from more than 75 games including Angry Birds Showdown, Words of Wonders, Cut the Rope among others. Users can also share the game with friends by tapping the three-dot more menu. Furthermore, users can also save their game progress and keep a track of their all-time best scores.

Since it’s a gradual rollout, Google has said that it might take time for Playables to appear for all users but should happen in the coming months. We checked on the desktop and iOS versions of YouTube but Playables wasn’t available for us at the moment.

This isn’t Google’s first tryst with gaming. A couple of years ago, Google had launched a gaming service called Stadia. However, in 2023, Google announced that it is shuttering down Stadia for good. Google had admitted that Stadia hadn’t “gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service”. Now, with Playables it is taking another shot at gaming.