techspot Google Wants to Try Streaming Games Again via Youtube

[UltraMega]

Quote

Reporters at The Wall Street Journal have seen an internal email sent to Google employees, which is seemingly inviting people to test a new gaming-related offering hosted by YouTube. The service, which is internally known as "Playables," would turn the video giant from a passive service into a "live" gaming platform.
 

Playables would let users instantly begin a gaming session while they're watching a related video, both on the web and the app version of YouTube. The service would initially offer "easily shareable games," sources say, while the only available title in the current test phase is a casual arcade game named Stack Bounce.

YouTube wants to bring online gaming to its video platform

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Stadia is dead, but cloud gaming lives on. Google closed its belated gaming service five months ago, but the company is seemingly still willing to bet on...

 

In one sense, this would make a lot of sense, a lot more than trying to get devs to port to Linux just for a tiny streaming service. This sounds like what Google wanted to do conceptually from the beginning, but for some reason they pivoted to making their own Linux consoles a separate service instead (Stadia). Microsoft was smart to tie their streaming service to game pass as an ad-on instead of making it the main feature because there just isn't enough interest in game streaming right now to easily justify making it anything more than an ad-on. Now it seems like Google is wising up and is going to try the same strategy by adding the option to YouTube. YouTube obviously has a much wider reach that Xbox or PlayStation, so if they manage to make this work effectively, they have a really good shot at creating a strong foothold in the market... but this is Google so feels highly likely that they will mess this up. Time will tell.