In the ever-changing technology world, surprises await us around every corner. But this time, it is YouTube that has gone to the next level: the video-sharing site has extended its Playables feature by creating a diverse selection of more than 75 free games – from classic hits such as Angry Birds Showdown to brain-teasing games such as Trivia Crack, all for users’ pleasure. Coming fresh off the ground from a trial run last year, Playables are now starting to roll out more widely to Android, iOS and the web, allowing users to get daily doses of light gaming combined with traditional video content. Let us take a short walk into this utopian gaming world and examine what makes YouTube’s latest move a game-changer.
Instead, GOOGLE has created so-called Playables, mini games that are integrated into YouTube, but seem like another extension of the browsing of content. When you load YouTube on a mobile app or in the desktop web browser, you can immediately play a rudimentary game without having to do a search or follow a link. They take advantage of the fact that people don’t mind watching ads: ads have been about as integrated into YouTube content as is possible For GOOGLE, the ultimate goal is seemlessly woven in: the company hopes that by hosting “free-to-play” games directly on YouTube, users will have opportunities to explore what YouTube has to offer beyond video content in a fun, interactive way.
But they’re easy to get to. The majority of users will find a carousel of games on their Home feed, or by clicking the Explore navigation drawer on the bottom, which looks like this: if you liked that, you’ll like these games. You can save Playables so that, like your favourite movies and music, your games will populate the You tab, just below Your movies & TV: Playables are clearly something GOOGLE is thinking about carefully, and weaving into the YouTube interface.
YouTube Premium subscribers will enjoy the game audio muted and their current video continuing to play in the background, for a double shot of video-gaming night. Free users don’t miss out entirely: game audio still takes precedence, but the brand-free experience will let you get lost in YouTube’s gaming worlds uninterrupted.
The variety of Playables is astonishingly diverse: categories include Action, Sports, Brain Puzzle, Arcade, RPG Strategy, Board Card, Trivia Word, and Simulation, so you can play something simple or quick, or with the dramatic depth of a role playing game (RPG), the frantic pace of an arcade game, or the cerebral challenge of a puzzle. Since GOOGLE owns YouTube, it has a good sample of games for all tastes.
YouTube has announced it’s expanding the Playables experiment with promises to widen availability of the program to more users over the coming months. The slow expansion of the program is promising: it indicates to GOOGLE the average user is willing to spend time and effort using mobile augmented reality, and that it can fit into the YouTube ecosystem across many platforms.
But the potential for growth and evolution is significant: as Playables mature beyond a beta and into a wider audience, their creators might find new ways to leverage the marriage of video and gaming. In another 20 years, what could YouTube look like? While all of this is new to GOOGLE, and the Playables are still finding their footing, one can only imagine the changes and improvements that will make YouTube even more of a place for gamers and video aficionados.
At the centre of YouTube’s Playables expansion is GOOGLE’s ingenuity to blend gaming with the consumption of video content. The wielding of GOOGLE’s technology prowess is evident, as it has not only given rise to a whole new category of entertainment on YouTube, but also demonstrated how it is committed to providing a better experience for its users who represent such a vast audience.
With Playables, it is positioning itself at the intersection of this hunger, of a growing appetite for games. YouTube is the right platform to distribute an eclectic range of games to a wide audience, and with Playables, GOOGLE is expanding its presence in the gaming domain.
What makes Playables different is that they offer far more than a mere diversion – they are an unlimited source of content surfing, thanks to GOOGLE’s incessant innovation. At YouTube, GOOGLE is once again transforming video to deliver endless forms of entertainment; by extension, what it actually reveals is that the future of content consumption will be rich, interactive and infinitely open.
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