YouTube Expands Playables: Free Games Now Available to All Users
YouTube is expanding its offering of lightweight, free games known as “Playables”, making them available to all users within the YouTube app and on the YouTube Home page.
Initially, these games were only accessible to a select group of users for testing, and later to YouTube Premium subscribers.
Despite not generating revenue through paid downloads or in-app purchases, YouTube’s Playables pose a competitive threat to the App Store’s free games, which are popular among casual gamers and earn income through advertising.
As YouTube’s parent company, Google, shifts its focus towards integrating AI, there are questions about the potential impact on its lucrative advertising business. In the future, free games on YouTube could potentially serve as another platform for displaying ads.
However, Google has not yet indicated plans to monetize its Playables. Instead, these games could serve as a means of keeping YouTube users engaged with the app during their browsing and viewing sessions.
The Playables lineup includes popular titles such as Angry Birds Showdown, Words of Wonders, Cut the Rope, Tomb of the Mask, and Trivia Crack, among others. The catalog also features games from Google’s HTML minigames service and its internal incubator, Area 120. Currently, there are over 75 mini-games in the Playables catalog. Users can save their game progress and track their all-time best scores.
The Playables feature will not be immediately available to all users, but is expected to be fully rolled out in the coming weeks. YouTube’s move into gaming mirrors similar efforts by other tech giants, such as Netflix, which is expanding its own game catalog, and Fortnite creator Epic Games, which is aiming to bring its games store to European users.
These developments underscore how companies are leveraging games to bypass App Store commissions and enhance their own profitability.
