Google officially announced the winding down of its cloud gaming initiative Stadia late last year, and pulled the plug earlier in January. Though it looks like the internet search giant may still have some gaming aspirations still, even if via another subsidiary under its massive umbrella. That subsidiary looks to be YouTube, surprisingly, with workers being invited to test what is called Playables.
The Wall Street Journal reports that YouTube sent an email to employees looking for volunteers to test this Playables product. It has been described as something that gives users access to games on mobile devices or desktop computers alike, and can easily be played and shared between each other. One game that was made available for testing was Stack Bounce, which has players try to smash layers of bricks with a bouncing ball. The report notes that the game would be instantly playable via YouTube, be it on a web browser or its dedicated app on Android or iOS.
Despite the description, 9to5Google has identified the Stack Bounce game as something that originated as an Area 120 project as a game for low-power devices and slow connections. In fact, you may have seen ads for cloned versions of the game yourself on the internet. Also noted that you can already play these games either on the web or Android Auto, the latter likely for when you’re waiting to pick someone or something up.
All in all, Playables on YouTube doesn’t look like much of a successor to what Google Stadia, if it’s even a fair comparison to start with. The only surviving element looks to be the bit where the games can be easily joined and shared, straight from a video. And on that note, adding games to a video platform seems counterintuitive, as it requires the splitting the viewer’s attention. The report does cite a spokesperson as saying that the company has “nothing to announce right now”.
(Source: WSJ, 9to5Google, GameSnacks)
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