YouTube confirms it’s testing a games offering called ‘Playables’

YouTube is letting a select number of users play online games as part of a new experiment. The games will live in a new “Playables” section on YouTube’s home feed, and can be accessed on both desktop and mobile.

This confirms a previous report by the Wall Street Journal, which wrote that Playables would feature titles such as Stack Bounce, an arcade-style game where players bounce a 3D ball to break through layers of rotating bricks.

Stack Bounce has been available on Google’s minigames service, GameSnacks, since 2021 so it’s likely a lot of users will want to play the game on YouTube.

Users can view and control their history and saved game progress in YouTube’s history tab in “My Activity.”

The experiment comes less than a year after Google announced it would kill its cloud gaming service Stadia after it failed to gain enough traction, likely struggling to compete with Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming and Nvidia GeForce Now. According to statistics shared by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), Stadia had an estimated 0-5% share of the cloud gaming market in 2022, compared to Nvidia GeForce with 20-30%.