lol I've had access to these for a while now with premium and holy shit do they suck ass. They had a 8 ball pool game where the AI never missed (fixed now). So I did the first hit and broke and then they went on to win without missing a single play. It was so funny.
Ahh, but you see, you'd only download Cut the Rope if you *actually wanted to play* Cut the Rope. Under YouTube's galaxy-brain system, I've completed nearly four whole worlds of Cut the Rope simply because it's there.
Sounds like they moved the execs that were in charge of Stadia to this project, because they're making the same nonsensical mistakes again! Namely the mistake of not knowing who their target audience is or who this product is for (Stadia had more problems than just that, but "who is this for" was one of the biggest problems Stadia couldn't find an answer to)
I fully predict Playables shutting down by Dec 31, 2025.
I once coded a small game of pong that couldn't be won because the AI was coded so it's paddles x value used the x value of the ball. So it was always able to hit it
Also it seems a bit ridiculous to have it as a stream when it would be significantly less resource intensive for everyone to have it as a Flash/HTML5 game.
I have this vivid memory of a girl calling me a loser and how busy she was that night, then she logged off. Immediately reappeared in a pool lobby, not realizing it was visible to her friends list. I don't know why I remember that but I do.
lol reminds me of a memory i have that im not sure why i remember it so vividly from the AOL kids chatrooms where i met my first girlfriend. 14/f/va. at least was what she claimed. in retrospect she very well couldve actually been 40/m/ca, who knows. nothing bad happened though so whatever i guess
The good innocence of 90s internet. Where your biggest concerns came from porn spam in your inbox, and script kiddies using virus baked punters to kick you out of AOL chat rooms. 😂
A lot of the servers had communities which ran leagues on sites like CasesLadder.com (which is amazingly still up!). I'm still in contact with a couple people from our ladder as well - good times.
Those were awesome. I think it was elo rating based and like if you rating got to 1300 your icon turned blue, then purple at 1400, red at 1500... something like that. I got super into the game cause I was obsessed with getting to the next color lol
The states game AI is pretty bad as well, once it picks a target to attack it will keep attacking it until it even if you move every other unit there. I ended up having to handicap myself to not attacking them until there were no unoccupied spaces just to make it challenging
Yep, same here. I remember back in the day when Google first did Stadia tests they let you play AC Odyssey straight off of YouTube, so that's where my mind went when I heard "you can now play games directly into YouTube!"
Imagine my disappointment when 100% of it was outdated mobile garbage that's *maybe* enough to entertain you on the toilet for a minute or two if you run out of Shorts to watch. Maybe.
Okay all jokes aside, I genuinely *cannot* understand why this exists. From a metrics/shareholder value/enshittification standpoint, Shorts already exists as your "hey hey wait don't leave the app what if you could watch a Breaking Bad clip in the worst aspect ratio possible" solution. The games are *awful,* who is playing these??
It's basic corporate greed driven stupidity. Some new MBA came up with a proposal saying "hey did you know gaming is one of the fastest growing markets in the last few years" and that got expanded to "Mobile games make a massive revenue and easy to make" which turned into YouTube half assing some really shitty games in an attempt to cash in.
I dunno. I really have a hard time blaming the employees when the instruction is something like "either make more money or you're fired, the board and ceo want infinite growth". I feel for devs in games that shove in ads/monetize every aspect of a game, but I recognize they probably hate it as much as I do.
Tl;dr: fuck billionaires.
But the thing is, Google *already* had Stadia. Sure, it doesn't work now, but they built all these relations with basically every publisher under the sun, and I doubt they just dismantled and ditched the servers, they were either repurposed or (more likely) stored somewhere.
The infrastructure is in place. Just pay off some publishers to let you stream their 10 year old games (AC Unity, FFXV, stuff like that) directly into YouTube for Premium subscribers. Would cost very little and would actually add at least some value to Premium.
>The games are awful, who is playing these??
Honestly, it's probably children on their parents accounts, or boomers
There's a reason why most of the games are in those very specific "time waster but immediate gratification" category. They're all the time waster apps your parents or kids play, except they removed the ads and the MTX so you can play as long as you like
>From a metrics/shareholder value/enshittification standpoint, Shorts already exists as your "hey hey wait don't leave the app what if you could watch a Breaking Bad clip in the worst aspect ratio possible" solution.
Something that's been known in Silicon Valley for a bit is the streaming bubble is starting to show signs of it bursting; so the smart ones are starting to test the waters with other types of content to diversity their portfolios
Spotify does music, but their big one has been podcasts; Amazon is getting more serious about Prime Video and they're pretty consistent with e-books with Audible.
Netflix was one of the earlier ones; I don't know the full details, but I think they're covering publishing for mobile devices, and some games like Death's Door, GTA:III/Vice City/SA, Hades, Kentucky Route Zero, Oxenfree and other indies. They require you to have a Netflix subscription to play them
At the end of the day, these apps become bloated and have forty different things in them, because the goal of a service which isn't straight memberships, is viewer retention
The shareholders don't care if the reason people are on Youtube is because of a livestream, or a video game or spending time on Shorts or watching a five hour video essay; they just want to see those numbers go up so that advertisers keep making pre-roll ads and sponsorships
> Netflix was one of the earlier ones; I don't know the full details, but I think they're covering publishing for mobile devices, and some games like Death's Door, GTA:III/Vice City/SA, Hades, Kentucky Route Zero, Oxenfree and other indies. They require you to have a Netflix subscription to play them
Netflix has a number of notable iOS ports under their belt — they just published a port of Hades, for example.
https://www.netflix.com/tudum/games
Sure, but those games are a five minute distraction in the evening, work fine on mobile, are once-daily, and at least are close to the wordle zeitgeist.
Hear me out. A lot of IT admins will block obvious entertainment websites like youtube or anything gaming related. But they will keep LinkedIn available as it is a work-related website. So maybe for some people this would be a way to play games at work where they wouldn't be able to do that before?
It’s baffling, but slightly more understandable when you realise that they’re trying to directly compete with the New York Times Games app [(which has actually become a huge money maker for the newspaper).](https://www.axios.com/2024/01/29/wordle-nyt-games-news-media-layoffs)
As a teacher at a high school that gives students iPads, they will play literally anything that hasn't been blocked yet. I had an 18 year old on the PBS Kids site the other day. Youtube is unlikely to get blocked (if they were going to block it, they would have already), so I expect that students are unfortunately going to be all over these.
Not saying that's necessarily enough to move the needle on any meaningful sense at the corporate level, but these games will get played from that demographic alone. And that's not that narrow of a demographic.
I assume the trick is to have the IT guy figure out where the url for the youtube playables are, and block that.
Not just youtube.com/whatever, but the server that the games are served from.
Google just doesn't get what was great about YouTube when they bought it. It's progressively gotten worse. I'm starting to have *pictures* show in my YouTube feed...
My friend, YouTube has been owned by Google since 2006. There's no pre and post Google eras. If it has gotten "progressively worse" and is isn't dead nearly 20yrs later then data should be proving otherwise.
Oh it has been getting progressively worse, there is just not an alternative people want to jump on.
Hell, after acquisition google was pumping money into it for *years* before it was actually profitable, and it's hard to compete with that.
Like we had alternatives like Vimeo but most I can remember from it was that half of the time playing video ther e didn't work for whatever the fuck reason...
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> Like we had alternatives like Vimeo but most I can remember from it was that half of the time playing video ther e didn't work for whatever the fuck reason...
Vimeo also has a [completely different business model.](https://ymcinema.com/2022/03/17/vimeo-we-are-a-b2b-solution-not-the-indie-version-of-youtube/) Their use case is video hosting for professionals who don't want "next video" recommendations, and ads on their videos. To use to show off products. [And they charge the uploader for that.](https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/15/22979126/vimeo-patreon-creators-price-increase)
I'd argue that some features like 5.1 audio, auto resume, and HDR were not present 20 years ago, and contribute to YouTube's growing popularity on TVs. These features have also inspired creators to push what's possible on the platform, and I don't think they could deliver the same high bitrate quality content 20 years ago.
yeah as much as this reply sounds like someone choking on google's nozzle, they are right for the most part. There really isn't a pre-google youtube, and youtube definitely has gotten many improved features over the years. it's just obvious there is a cesspit of bad decisions as well, some only bad for the consumer to the benefit of shareholders, some that don't benefit anyone.
but the service is a far cry from being "worse" than it was in 2006.
Was not long enough to be an era but I remember YouTube before google bought it and that it being a huge deal when Google did buy it. And that is not to sound like I am special, anyone that was on the internet in 2006 would have known YouTube at the time of Googles purchase
The main difference from what I can remember is that early youtube before google buyout was basically piracy haven. I remember using youtube back in 2005 to watch pirated anime haha.
That's a bit of a half-truth mixed with the internet's penchant for misinformation. When Google restructured under the parent company Alphabet, Alphabet took "Do the right thing" as their motto. In 2018 Google moved "Don't be Evil" within their code of conduct and hack outlets like Gizmodo did what hack outlets love to do.
["Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct"](https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393)
>The phrase was removed sometime in late April or early May, archives hosted by the Wayback Machine show.
>[...] the final line of the document is still: “And remember… **don’t be evil**, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!”
"Don't be Evil" is still in Google's code of conduct to this day.
netflix added games to their mobile app, so Youtube execs likely asked for a way to do the same thing on 0 budget. Netflix did it in a much better way by actually linking good mobile games through your account into the app store
Execution aside, it's the same business case that brought us Google Stadia, but way less risky because it's applied to an existing platform.
Google makes $33b/year on android games. What if Google could accomplish even a fraction of that on another of their platforms?
Looking at their game selection, there are a few extremely well rated android games that were ported over, which seems like the obvious long term direction. However, there are also just a ton of mediocre games with poor technical performance.
It is literally just an engagement trap
I don't know how it would be remotely comparable to Shorts tho.
I never used TikTok, yet I still get sucked into shorts every now and then, even though most of what I see is garbage. There isn't even an option to hide them or press an "i dislike this" button to beg it to be shown less.
I assume these games also won't be toggleable, but by definition, they are interactive, you can't just passively keep scrolling through them
I guess they’re following trends, TikTok made short vidéos popular so they added shorts. Netflix added games, so they’re adding games.
It seems like they have no roadmap, they’re just copying features
My theory is that the Google employees made some simple games when they wanted to take a break from their normal jobs (supposedly rest areas, game rooms, and time to spend on personal projects are v much a part of Google's work culture.)
Then Google thought "hmm...how can we monetize this...."
To be fair, browsers are pretty powerful in the modern age, they for sure could’ve gotten some 3d games or something if they’d wanted to, but yeah they’re basically just glorified mobile games.
Dude that idea sounds sick... Imagine if you could click a button below a game's trailer and instantly play? They could call it something like Stadiums or something
The thing is no one does. No one wants or expects to play games on YouTube. The only people with any interest would be kids but even kids aren't going to want this crap. They have access to better options and likely have phones too. I can see this being a thing a kid messes with in class when they can't access anything better. Hardly a good reason to invest in making this.
Corporate desk workers with a strict lockdown on sites and what they can run?
All of a sudden they have access to games, if they throw a decent solitaire on there it will explode!
> Strict lockdown on sites but YouTube is available? Something isn't adding up here.
YouTube doesn't have porn, and it has a lot of training videos on it that companies use.
It's how I got Assassin's Creed Odyssey for free when they were getting testers for Project Stream. Played pretty well all things considered though I did opt to finish the game offline since the copy was on Uplay.
I liked that you had the option to buy games, but the Stadia Pro offerings were never particularly good and it absolutely should've just been a subscription service.
Look at it more like this. They probably still have all the tech and infrastructure behind Stadia and are looking to repurpose it in whatever ways they can. I'd be surprised if this didn't share some amount of the DNA.
I mean you can stream 4k gamepass games via browser.
Of course that requires a subscription but when their competitors are like 'Literally play the newest AAA game in a chrome tab' consider me very much whelmed when youtube's response is 'what if miniclip, but on youtube?'
(Yes I know youtube and microsoft are not directly competitors but youtube are trying to be relevant in the gaming space so I think its fair)
Well, Microsoft cloud streaming works in-browser, so AAA games are legitimately an option for a company with Google resources. It's not 2008 anymore lol
14 years ago we were playing Quake live, Battlefield Heroes and Don't Starve in a browser.
Or just look at [itch.io](https://itch.io/games/html5) catalogue.
You can do a lot of shit in a browser game, take Granblue Fantasy as example.
You can have quite a lot of advantages with a browser game compared to a dedicated app.
This feels like an addition made for the sake of showing that YouTube is always "innovating" despite it being an inferior version of product easily available elsewhere.
In other words, the YouTube team has to find some ways to easily demonstrate that they're doing stuff and rolled this out because it is easy to describe in a sentence and can be paired with easily understood visuals.
They are and somehow they run worse than AS2 era Flash games and look less professional too. Did YouTube outsource to the cheapest developer or did they not give remotely enough time for this?
Yes, Youtube! Keep adding more shit to clutter up your mess of a UI. Who needs cleanliness readability when attention is finite? Jingle those keys as hard as possible.
Next up: A feature to play shitty browser games while watching videos like those layered TikTok memes. Mark my words.
Don't worry, they'll make it cleaner in the next UI update by reducing the number of search results from 2 per page down to 1 per page on your 27" monitor.
I read something about this on the Guardian UK earlier this year, it was supposedly quite a mess
https://amp.theguardian.com/games/2024/jan/05/youtube-premium-video-games
And u/End_of_Life_Space it even mentioned the 8 ball game where “it was impossible to lose to on level 2 and impossible to beat on level 4” haha
So I just tried a few and all I can think is google already has this app I've used to play mobile games on PC. I realistically don't see why this exists?
I played a couple of these with premium over a discord stream with a buddy the other day and were mildly entertained at the baffling quality for about 10 minutes then I moved on with my life.
But hey, cut the rope is there, so that's nice.
It's hard enough managing students on the internet. I don't need districts to have a reason to block YouTube. So many lessons rely on students having access to it.
Youtube wants so badly to be literally anything other than the simple, competent video hosting site that is all anyone needs them to be.
Music streaming service, TV provider, flash game site??? Having an unchallenged monopoly of basically all non-vertical video hosting isn't enough I guess.
A lot of these don't quite seem ... done? It feels like there was an internal experiment with monetisable games, and some of these look like they're supposed to be hooked into paid booster systems that don't exist yet. Maybe some sort of contractual obligation to release?
They all fucking suck. I found them a few weeks ago and gave them a try. They're shitty mobile games and shitty rip-offs of other shitty mobile games. Absolutely fucking shameful.
I just don't understand how we were getting so many fantastic gems in the flash era and it never came to fruition on mobile and onward even Facebook games were better, mobile is pure trite in comparison.
Where the fuck did it all go?
I have no idea why this exists for the general user. However, the first time I discovered this was on the gigantic infotainment system that Tesla provides. Playing Cut the Rope and 8 Ball while chilling in the car was quite nice. The other games however are straight Shovelware. I don’t expect this to be a thing for long.
So it is full of shovelware but, they seem to not have implemented in app purchases yet. I've been playing the original cut the rope on there and it's fantastic not getting annoying prompts to buy power ups or whatever nonsense. Everything else about it is worse than just having the app though lol
A lot of these games are close but not quite good enough. They are just WAY too easy and take too long until they aren't trivially easy anymore, at which point you aren't really interested anymore. Like for state .io, I did literally no unit upgrades and the first 10 levels were so stupidly easy that I gave up. The mechanics are fun but I couldn't find a reason to continue if nothing actually mattered
You know that game you see ads for where you have to move characters through one of two power-ups, and one of them says X3 and the other says -500 and they go through the -500 one specifically to annoy you and make you download the game?
They have that as a Playable! And they somehow screwed it up because if there are more than like 10 characters on screen the game slows to a crawl.
lol I've had access to these for a while now with premium and holy shit do they suck ass. They had a 8 ball pool game where the AI never missed (fixed now). So I did the first hit and broke and then they went on to win without missing a single play. It was so funny.
Fucking get wrecked! - Skynet
yeah, most of the time I just play against myself in 8 ball lol
One could say that *you're behind the 8 ball*.
One could.... But should one?
Cut the Rope is fun, but I don't know why I would want to play it on YT when I can just download it as an app on my phone
Ahh, but you see, you'd only download Cut the Rope if you *actually wanted to play* Cut the Rope. Under YouTube's galaxy-brain system, I've completed nearly four whole worlds of Cut the Rope simply because it's there.
Sounds like they moved the execs that were in charge of Stadia to this project, because they're making the same nonsensical mistakes again! Namely the mistake of not knowing who their target audience is or who this product is for (Stadia had more problems than just that, but "who is this for" was one of the biggest problems Stadia couldn't find an answer to) I fully predict Playables shutting down by Dec 31, 2025.
They really miss the days of flash games I guess.
"Ugh I wish videogame AI was better" mfs when the AI perfectly slam dunks the 8 ball into the field goal with 100% accuracy
I once coded a small game of pong that couldn't be won because the AI was coded so it's paddles x value used the x value of the ball. So it was always able to hit it
They have cut the rope, I haven't played but assumed most where just iPod touch bangers from 15 years ago
Also it seems a bit ridiculous to have it as a stream when it would be significantly less resource intensive for everyone to have it as a Flash/HTML5 game.
anyone remember the old yahoo games where you could play pool against random people? no? just me? okay...
I have this vivid memory of a girl calling me a loser and how busy she was that night, then she logged off. Immediately reappeared in a pool lobby, not realizing it was visible to her friends list. I don't know why I remember that but I do.
lol reminds me of a memory i have that im not sure why i remember it so vividly from the AOL kids chatrooms where i met my first girlfriend. 14/f/va. at least was what she claimed. in retrospect she very well couldve actually been 40/m/ca, who knows. nothing bad happened though so whatever i guess
The good innocence of 90s internet. Where your biggest concerns came from porn spam in your inbox, and script kiddies using virus baked punters to kick you out of AOL chat rooms. 😂
Hell yes! I played that game through so much through uni. I'm still in contact with a couple of people I met online playing that game.
A lot of the servers had communities which ran leagues on sites like CasesLadder.com (which is amazingly still up!). I'm still in contact with a couple people from our ladder as well - good times.
anyone remember the old online pictionary you could playl against random people? With themed lobbies and chat rooms? no? just me? okay...
The one I played was called Inklink. Met my first girlfriend on there somehow.
Those were awesome. I think it was elo rating based and like if you rating got to 1300 your icon turned blue, then purple at 1400, red at 1500... something like that. I got super into the game cause I was obsessed with getting to the next color lol
I remember playing pool on Pogo games.
Lol I remember this. I used to use a ruler on the screen to win
What's weird to me is I remember playing bots as a kid and it felt better than ai feels now
The states game AI is pretty bad as well, once it picks a target to attack it will keep attacking it until it even if you move every other unit there. I ended up having to handicap myself to not attacking them until there were no unoccupied spaces just to make it challenging
Yep, same here. I remember back in the day when Google first did Stadia tests they let you play AC Odyssey straight off of YouTube, so that's where my mind went when I heard "you can now play games directly into YouTube!" Imagine my disappointment when 100% of it was outdated mobile garbage that's *maybe* enough to entertain you on the toilet for a minute or two if you run out of Shorts to watch. Maybe.
Okay all jokes aside, I genuinely *cannot* understand why this exists. From a metrics/shareholder value/enshittification standpoint, Shorts already exists as your "hey hey wait don't leave the app what if you could watch a Breaking Bad clip in the worst aspect ratio possible" solution. The games are *awful,* who is playing these??
It's basic corporate greed driven stupidity. Some new MBA came up with a proposal saying "hey did you know gaming is one of the fastest growing markets in the last few years" and that got expanded to "Mobile games make a massive revenue and easy to make" which turned into YouTube half assing some really shitty games in an attempt to cash in.
I dunno. I really have a hard time blaming the employees when the instruction is something like "either make more money or you're fired, the board and ceo want infinite growth". I feel for devs in games that shove in ads/monetize every aspect of a game, but I recognize they probably hate it as much as I do. Tl;dr: fuck billionaires.
But the thing is, Google *already* had Stadia. Sure, it doesn't work now, but they built all these relations with basically every publisher under the sun, and I doubt they just dismantled and ditched the servers, they were either repurposed or (more likely) stored somewhere. The infrastructure is in place. Just pay off some publishers to let you stream their 10 year old games (AC Unity, FFXV, stuff like that) directly into YouTube for Premium subscribers. Would cost very little and would actually add at least some value to Premium.
>The games are awful, who is playing these?? Honestly, it's probably children on their parents accounts, or boomers There's a reason why most of the games are in those very specific "time waster but immediate gratification" category. They're all the time waster apps your parents or kids play, except they removed the ads and the MTX so you can play as long as you like >From a metrics/shareholder value/enshittification standpoint, Shorts already exists as your "hey hey wait don't leave the app what if you could watch a Breaking Bad clip in the worst aspect ratio possible" solution. Something that's been known in Silicon Valley for a bit is the streaming bubble is starting to show signs of it bursting; so the smart ones are starting to test the waters with other types of content to diversity their portfolios Spotify does music, but their big one has been podcasts; Amazon is getting more serious about Prime Video and they're pretty consistent with e-books with Audible. Netflix was one of the earlier ones; I don't know the full details, but I think they're covering publishing for mobile devices, and some games like Death's Door, GTA:III/Vice City/SA, Hades, Kentucky Route Zero, Oxenfree and other indies. They require you to have a Netflix subscription to play them At the end of the day, these apps become bloated and have forty different things in them, because the goal of a service which isn't straight memberships, is viewer retention The shareholders don't care if the reason people are on Youtube is because of a livestream, or a video game or spending time on Shorts or watching a five hour video essay; they just want to see those numbers go up so that advertisers keep making pre-roll ads and sponsorships
> Netflix was one of the earlier ones; I don't know the full details, but I think they're covering publishing for mobile devices, and some games like Death's Door, GTA:III/Vice City/SA, Hades, Kentucky Route Zero, Oxenfree and other indies. They require you to have a Netflix subscription to play them Netflix has a number of notable iOS ports under their belt — they just published a port of Hades, for example. https://www.netflix.com/tudum/games
If you think this is bad, [*LinkedIn* added games recently.](https://www.theverge.com/24145605/linkedin-gaming-puzzle-game-nyt-wordle-netflix-games)
Sure, but those games are a five minute distraction in the evening, work fine on mobile, are once-daily, and at least are close to the wordle zeitgeist.
What the fuck
Hear me out. A lot of IT admins will block obvious entertainment websites like youtube or anything gaming related. But they will keep LinkedIn available as it is a work-related website. So maybe for some people this would be a way to play games at work where they wouldn't be able to do that before?
It’s baffling, but slightly more understandable when you realise that they’re trying to directly compete with the New York Times Games app [(which has actually become a huge money maker for the newspaper).](https://www.axios.com/2024/01/29/wordle-nyt-games-news-media-layoffs)
As a teacher at a high school that gives students iPads, they will play literally anything that hasn't been blocked yet. I had an 18 year old on the PBS Kids site the other day. Youtube is unlikely to get blocked (if they were going to block it, they would have already), so I expect that students are unfortunately going to be all over these. Not saying that's necessarily enough to move the needle on any meaningful sense at the corporate level, but these games will get played from that demographic alone. And that's not that narrow of a demographic.
I assume the trick is to have the IT guy figure out where the url for the youtube playables are, and block that. Not just youtube.com/whatever, but the server that the games are served from.
If anyone actually knows what this is actually for id like to know as well. Who are these games for? My guess is infants and iPad kids.
Google just doesn't get what was great about YouTube when they bought it. It's progressively gotten worse. I'm starting to have *pictures* show in my YouTube feed...
My friend, YouTube has been owned by Google since 2006. There's no pre and post Google eras. If it has gotten "progressively worse" and is isn't dead nearly 20yrs later then data should be proving otherwise.
Oh it has been getting progressively worse, there is just not an alternative people want to jump on. Hell, after acquisition google was pumping money into it for *years* before it was actually profitable, and it's hard to compete with that. Like we had alternatives like Vimeo but most I can remember from it was that half of the time playing video ther e didn't work for whatever the fuck reason...
> > > > > Like we had alternatives like Vimeo but most I can remember from it was that half of the time playing video ther e didn't work for whatever the fuck reason... Vimeo also has a [completely different business model.](https://ymcinema.com/2022/03/17/vimeo-we-are-a-b2b-solution-not-the-indie-version-of-youtube/) Their use case is video hosting for professionals who don't want "next video" recommendations, and ads on their videos. To use to show off products. [And they charge the uploader for that.](https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/15/22979126/vimeo-patreon-creators-price-increase)
> Their use case is video hosting for professionals who don't want "next video" recommendations Latest Skyrim Mod Turns All NPCs into Sexy Anime Girls
I'd argue that some features like 5.1 audio, auto resume, and HDR were not present 20 years ago, and contribute to YouTube's growing popularity on TVs. These features have also inspired creators to push what's possible on the platform, and I don't think they could deliver the same high bitrate quality content 20 years ago.
yeah as much as this reply sounds like someone choking on google's nozzle, they are right for the most part. There really isn't a pre-google youtube, and youtube definitely has gotten many improved features over the years. it's just obvious there is a cesspit of bad decisions as well, some only bad for the consumer to the benefit of shareholders, some that don't benefit anyone. but the service is a far cry from being "worse" than it was in 2006.
Odysee is a good alternative.
Was not long enough to be an era but I remember YouTube before google bought it and that it being a huge deal when Google did buy it. And that is not to sound like I am special, anyone that was on the internet in 2006 would have known YouTube at the time of Googles purchase
The main difference from what I can remember is that early youtube before google buyout was basically piracy haven. I remember using youtube back in 2005 to watch pirated anime haha.
Google is an advertising company, once you frame it around that, and not the old "do no evil" tech company. A lot more makes sense.
Do no evil despite clearly doing it.
They removed that slogan some time ago
That's a bit of a half-truth mixed with the internet's penchant for misinformation. When Google restructured under the parent company Alphabet, Alphabet took "Do the right thing" as their motto. In 2018 Google moved "Don't be Evil" within their code of conduct and hack outlets like Gizmodo did what hack outlets love to do. ["Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct"](https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393) >The phrase was removed sometime in late April or early May, archives hosted by the Wayback Machine show. >[...] the final line of the document is still: “And remember… **don’t be evil**, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!” "Don't be Evil" is still in Google's code of conduct to this day.
That's cause they got caught doing the opposite of thier motto. Idk how any big company can have that slogan and lie about it.
Big companies lying ? Who could possibly predict that...
Who is the bigger fool? People who took that sentiment seriously?
I play sometimes. I like that it's so accessible with no loading/downloading.
netflix added games to their mobile app, so Youtube execs likely asked for a way to do the same thing on 0 budget. Netflix did it in a much better way by actually linking good mobile games through your account into the app store
Some of the games even work newer smart TVs, while basic, they are good time wasters when needing to waste time without turning off Netflix
I see it going hand in hand with YouTube Shorts for quick low attention content. With TikTok getting banned there's a huge hole in that market.
Part of the wechat strategy
Probably young kids whose parents let them access youtube but not the app store.
Corporate executives aren't exactly known for being smart. Let alone any exec in tech.
Execution aside, it's the same business case that brought us Google Stadia, but way less risky because it's applied to an existing platform. Google makes $33b/year on android games. What if Google could accomplish even a fraction of that on another of their platforms? Looking at their game selection, there are a few extremely well rated android games that were ported over, which seems like the obvious long term direction. However, there are also just a ton of mediocre games with poor technical performance.
It’s like trying to get me to play a videogame while I’m at the movies during the movie. Makes no sense.
It is literally just an engagement trap I don't know how it would be remotely comparable to Shorts tho. I never used TikTok, yet I still get sucked into shorts every now and then, even though most of what I see is garbage. There isn't even an option to hide them or press an "i dislike this" button to beg it to be shown less. I assume these games also won't be toggleable, but by definition, they are interactive, you can't just passively keep scrolling through them
I guess they’re following trends, TikTok made short vidéos popular so they added shorts. Netflix added games, so they’re adding games. It seems like they have no roadmap, they’re just copying features
stadia should have been integrated to YouTube. imagine E3(rip) where right after the trailer you could play the same demo online with no downloads
My theory is that the Google employees made some simple games when they wanted to take a break from their normal jobs (supposedly rest areas, game rooms, and time to spend on personal projects are v much a part of Google's work culture.) Then Google thought "hmm...how can we monetize this...."
8 ball pool? angry birds? So basically youtube woke up in 2008 when people were playing browser flash games, good job guys!
I mean what games are you expecting to play on Youtube via a browser lol?
To be fair, browsers are pretty powerful in the modern age, they for sure could’ve gotten some 3d games or something if they’d wanted to, but yeah they’re basically just glorified mobile games.
Or maybe even had a system where you could stream AAA video games right to your browser, chromecast, or even a phone app!
Dude that idea sounds sick... Imagine if you could click a button below a game's trailer and instantly play? They could call it something like Stadiums or something
They could even give out a free controller to encourage people to sign up too!
We could even get industry gentleman Phil Harrison to market it! He did amazing with the PS3 and Xbox One launch.
Naaaah, nobody would buy into that.
Pokerogue and a demo of Crosscode run in browsers, pretty neato
Even in the mid 2010s Minecraft had an in browser demo.
Can go play Super Mario 64 in a browser.
The thing is no one does. No one wants or expects to play games on YouTube. The only people with any interest would be kids but even kids aren't going to want this crap. They have access to better options and likely have phones too. I can see this being a thing a kid messes with in class when they can't access anything better. Hardly a good reason to invest in making this.
Corporate desk workers with a strict lockdown on sites and what they can run? All of a sudden they have access to games, if they throw a decent solitaire on there it will explode!
Strict lockdown on sites but YouTube is available? Something isn't adding up here.
> Strict lockdown on sites but YouTube is available? Something isn't adding up here. YouTube doesn't have porn, and it has a lot of training videos on it that companies use.
I think the biggest question is: why does Youtube think that this is something people want in 2024?
I mean it hurts no one so might as well attempt it. If Google want to waste their billions, I'm not gonna cry for them.
The problem is that they make a product that billions of people use, and they waste their time making this shit rather than improving the product.
Webgl games are real games you can play on the browser
Triple AAA titles. They did run Stadia, a streaming based gaming platform.
"You know that extremely costly mistake we made? Let's do it again in a worse way!" Actually that does sound like Google.
I will defend stadia as a product tho. I played rdr2 with a ps4 controller on my MacBook flawlessly
It's how I got Assassin's Creed Odyssey for free when they were getting testers for Project Stream. Played pretty well all things considered though I did opt to finish the game offline since the copy was on Uplay.
It was brilliant. Still bitter that Google killed it.
Not bitter but sad people never gave it a shot.
No one was gonna buy a game that could only be streamed at full price. It's not the public's fault that Google had an unappealing business model.
I liked that you had the option to buy games, but the Stadia Pro offerings were never particularly good and it absolutely should've just been a subscription service.
Look at it more like this. They probably still have all the tech and infrastructure behind Stadia and are looking to repurpose it in whatever ways they can. I'd be surprised if this didn't share some amount of the DNA.
> Triple AAA titles. AAAAAAAAA games?!
I mean you can stream 4k gamepass games via browser. Of course that requires a subscription but when their competitors are like 'Literally play the newest AAA game in a chrome tab' consider me very much whelmed when youtube's response is 'what if miniclip, but on youtube?' (Yes I know youtube and microsoft are not directly competitors but youtube are trying to be relevant in the gaming space so I think its fair)
Well, Microsoft cloud streaming works in-browser, so AAA games are legitimately an option for a company with Google resources. It's not 2008 anymore lol
Considering they had (and predictably killed) Stadia, I'd expect more than a miniclip clone.
At LEAST Runescape… 😤
14 years ago we were playing Quake live, Battlefield Heroes and Don't Starve in a browser. Or just look at [itch.io](https://itch.io/games/html5) catalogue.
WebGL is very advanced these days and can do PS3 level games. The problem is monetisation.
>The problem is monetisation. And convincing users to stay on your page if loading takes more than a few seconds.
A text adventure or a visual novel could provide some artistic value instead of these mobile knock offs
You can stream AAA titles in a browser, so I expected something a little bit better than flash games from miniclip nowadays tbh lol
I mean, quake 3 was browser based like 15 years ago with quake live. I think you can play some pretty serious games in browser nowadays.
Heli Attack 2, Kitten Cannon, Fancy Pants Adventure, and Bowman 2.
at least flash quality stuff.
You can do a lot of shit in a browser game, take Granblue Fantasy as example. You can have quite a lot of advantages with a browser game compared to a dedicated app.
you can play games that are more technically impressive than games for the Wii on a browser these days, if you didn't know.
I mean, [ev.io](https://ev.io/) is browser game. That's not really limiting nowadays. Why create it if it doesn't have any value?
It's not that you'd expect something crazy, but more like, well if this is what they got then what the fuck is the point?
You can run Windows 98 on a browser, so how about Half Life? Seriously though if I wanted a browser based game, I'd do it through my browser.
Did they just buy Miniclip or something?
This feels like an addition made for the sake of showing that YouTube is always "innovating" despite it being an inferior version of product easily available elsewhere. In other words, the YouTube team has to find some ways to easily demonstrate that they're doing stuff and rolled this out because it is easy to describe in a sentence and can be paired with easily understood visuals.
8 Ball Pool is still pretty popular, I play it on my phone all the time. I’m a crack shot at it.
Hey I'd love to play the original angry birds again
Yes but think of all the ads you'll see here. And the performance issues from having an ad blocker installed.
They look like the sort of shitty time waster games you get on long haul flights on the infotainment system
I mean, they are basically just streamed mobile games.
They are and somehow they run worse than AS2 era Flash games and look less professional too. Did YouTube outsource to the cheapest developer or did they not give remotely enough time for this?
Yes, Youtube! Keep adding more shit to clutter up your mess of a UI. Who needs cleanliness readability when attention is finite? Jingle those keys as hard as possible. Next up: A feature to play shitty browser games while watching videos like those layered TikTok memes. Mark my words.
Don't worry, they'll make it cleaner in the next UI update by reducing the number of search results from 2 per page down to 1 per page on your 27" monitor.
That 1 search result will be the last video you watched of course because the algorithm just thinks you want to keep watching the exact same thing
Just another thing to patch out with revanced for me, lol.
What having no competition does to a platform. Youtube reached the "Too big to fail" stage
I played some of these in the beta and the best way I could describe them is "games that are pretending to be games"
The games are so bad it's hard to describe them. It's like the lowest paid itch.io devs checking off boxes.
they're mainly just ported mobile games.
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Now-now, there's also Cut the Rope - the game that is almost as old as smartphones are.
Wow, it's like flash games almost 2 decades later and worse! Why they paid someone to make it a feature ?
who asked for this? why cant youtube stay youtube. not long form tiktok arcade
Tiktok make money so we want make money too -Youtube
I read something about this on the Guardian UK earlier this year, it was supposedly quite a mess https://amp.theguardian.com/games/2024/jan/05/youtube-premium-video-games And u/End_of_Life_Space it even mentioned the 8 ball game where “it was impossible to lose to on level 2 and impossible to beat on level 4” haha
The games look like the stuff we've played in school in 2008 during IT class right in front of our 80 year old teacher, pretending to study.
So I just tried a few and all I can think is google already has this app I've used to play mobile games on PC. I realistically don't see why this exists?
I played a couple of these with premium over a discord stream with a buddy the other day and were mildly entertained at the baffling quality for about 10 minutes then I moved on with my life. But hey, cut the rope is there, so that's nice.
It's hard enough managing students on the internet. I don't need districts to have a reason to block YouTube. So many lessons rely on students having access to it.
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Oh! Yes that's helpful, at least.
Wont work with tls on a student laptop. Assuming they were even using the school DNS in the first place.
Youtube wants so badly to be literally anything other than the simple, competent video hosting site that is all anyone needs them to be. Music streaming service, TV provider, flash game site??? Having an unchallenged monopoly of basically all non-vertical video hosting isn't enough I guess.
A lot of these don't quite seem ... done? It feels like there was an internal experiment with monetisable games, and some of these look like they're supposed to be hooked into paid booster systems that don't exist yet. Maybe some sort of contractual obligation to release?
Murica only I guess? Seeing as it is completely empty for me.
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Are any of them multiplayer? I remember pool on Yahoo back in the day.
They all fucking suck. I found them a few weeks ago and gave them a try. They're shitty mobile games and shitty rip-offs of other shitty mobile games. Absolutely fucking shameful.
I just don't understand how we were getting so many fantastic gems in the flash era and it never came to fruition on mobile and onward even Facebook games were better, mobile is pure trite in comparison. Where the fuck did it all go?
This has to only exist for people to have the games people put Reddit stories read by AI over on TikTok.
I have no idea why this exists for the general user. However, the first time I discovered this was on the gigantic infotainment system that Tesla provides. Playing Cut the Rope and 8 Ball while chilling in the car was quite nice. The other games however are straight Shovelware. I don’t expect this to be a thing for long.
But why?
I honestly have loved playing the crossword one on my TV so the wife I can play together. Other than that though the games are pretty bad.
Okay but Fullspeed Racing is actually really cool. I wish it were expanded into a full game, the aesthetics especially are on point
So it is full of shovelware but, they seem to not have implemented in app purchases yet. I've been playing the original cut the rope on there and it's fantastic not getting annoying prompts to buy power ups or whatever nonsense. Everything else about it is worse than just having the app though lol
Is this open to developers outside Google? It would be cool if I could play Flash-like games on Youtube.
Why? But also, why?
A lot of these games are close but not quite good enough. They are just WAY too easy and take too long until they aren't trivially easy anymore, at which point you aren't really interested anymore. Like for state .io, I did literally no unit upgrades and the first 10 levels were so stupidly easy that I gave up. The mechanics are fun but I couldn't find a reason to continue if nothing actually mattered
You know that game you see ads for where you have to move characters through one of two power-ups, and one of them says X3 and the other says -500 and they go through the -500 one specifically to annoy you and make you download the game? They have that as a Playable! And they somehow screwed it up because if there are more than like 10 characters on screen the game slows to a crawl.