Google Tests Game Streaming On YouTube

Google has had a spectacular flop with Stadia: Although it did pioneering work with game streaming, the majority of gamers did not take advantage of this offer. Stadia has been history since last fall, but could indirectly celebrate a small comeback.

Stadia was too early

Google’s cloud gaming service launched in November 2019, but the company pulled the plug three years later. The reason was simple: Stadia never had the success that the Mountain View, California-based company had hoped for. One explanation for this was that Google was definitely too early because experts are sure that game streaming will play a major role in the future – this is also shown by the discussions surrounding the takeover of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft.

Stadia could soon celebrate an indirect return. Because like 9to5Google reports, YouTube is currently testing a feature called “Playables” for a few select users. This is essentially game streaming that can be used via the desktop website as well as mobile.

Another “experiment”

Initially, the playable will run through YouTube’s “feature experiments,” meaning this option will only be available to a handful of users. “If you participate in this experiment, you will see a section on YouTube called Playables appear alongside other content in the Home Feed,” writes YouTube.

The video streaming service continues: “We are initially testing this with a limited number of users. You can view and control the history of your playables and the progress of your saved games in the YouTube history.”

In terms of content, the Playables games are currently still a long way from Stadia, because so far this streaming offers titles like Stack Bounce, i.e. games that can be assigned to casual mobile games. It is currently not clear whether the playable will ever reach the dimensions of Stadia; one can even doubt it. However, this experiment still shows that the topic of game streaming at Google is not completely a thing of the past.