YouTube launched a new feature on Tuesday: free mobile games you can play right in the app or on your desktop. After several months of testing the feature with YouTube Premium subscribers, the sub-100-game platform hybrid is now out for all users, and it’s, unsurprisingly, disappointing.
In order to comply with Apple’s App Store regulations, the YouTube app can’t directly compete with the App Store itself — that is, it can’t sell apps or games. So Google’s YouTube is offering free games within the app itself instead, and the throttled experience does little to inspire competition with even the free games on the App Store. Rather than downloading the games you want to play, Playables essentially functions like any other website that hosts games. (If you can’t think of one, it’s probably because most games live on our hard drives or in the cloud these days — but AddictingGames.com is an approximation that comes to mind.)
That means some well-produced games, like Tomb of the Mask, can do things like save your progress. Others restart each time you open the game on Playables. Some include controls designed for keyboard inputs, and others make you toggle between the trackpad and the mouse.
Besides a few highlights like Tomb of the Mask, Angry Birds Showdown, and Cut the Rope, there are tens of extremely cheap games that aren’t very enjoyable to play on the desktop. (Draw Climber, Lunch Box Ready, and Color Match are a few examples of the, uh, less polished options on Playables.) They’re also a bummer to play on the mobile app since the interface cuts off about one-tenth of the screen and has no full-screen mode. The browser version’s full-screen mode simply enlarges the browser to fill the screen, rather than just the game, as if it were a YouTube video.
Image: Happymagenta UAB/Playgendary via Polygon
I can’t knock YouTube for finding a way to make some of these games easily and legally playable (ha) on a browser sans ads — crushing a few levels of any given web-based game between meetings brings me right back to the computer room in the mid-2000s, in a good way — but with the advent of Steam, this move feels more like Google signaling to Apple that it’s still here to compete in the digital games marketplace space, rather than a move to benefit players. I might find myself playing some Tomb of the Mask on YouTube’s web browser, but I’m certainly not going to play it on YouTube’s mobile app considering it’s free on the App Store. So, to keep my progress in one place, I’ll just continue playing on my iPhone.
In terms of the interface, there’s a lot of room for improvement. Currently, you can only filter your Playables games by “Home,” which shows games you’ve played, and “Browse,” which shows all the games available in alphabetical order. You can also search in your YouTube search bar for a game, but you’ll have to wade through a few rows of videos and ads before you get to the Playables module.
That, along with the poor selection of titles, speak to one of the main reasons the Google Play Store hasn’t won out over Apple’s App Store: curation. I have access to both marketplaces, and consistently I find Google’s marketplace to be bloated with crappy games that are predominantly there to get eyes on the advertisements hosted within the games.
The App Store has this problem, too, but Apple is notoriously incisive about which apps are allowed on the store, particularly in terms of privacy and data collection. That means games with higher production value, aka teams with more cash and time to go through the Apple vetting process, might be more likely to land on both marketplaces while low-budget, quick-hit games might only land on the Play Store.
I expect Playables to become much more populated in the coming months, meaning a lot of these early complaints could subside. I’m especially curious to see whether YouTube releases any original games, which would make a much more compelling case for me to sink more time into the platform. And while I think this Playables a smart and sneaky way to get folks playing Google Play Store games on iPhones, I don’t think it’s going to nudge the industry one way or the other — at least not in its current state.
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