YouTube’s Playables is giving AddictingGames.com
YouTube launched a new feature on Tuesday: free mobile games you can play right in the app or on your desktop. After several months of testing the feature with YouTube Premium subscribers, the sub-100-game platform hybrid is now out for all users, and it’s, unsurprisingly, disappointing.
In order to comply with Apple’s App Store regulations, the YouTube app can’t directly compete with the App Store itself — that is, it can’t sell apps or games. So Google’s YouTube is offering free games within the app itself instead, and the throttled experience does little to inspire competition with even the free games on the App Store. Rather than downloading the games you want to play, Playables essentially functions like any other website that hosts games. (If you can’t think of one, it’s probably because most games live on our hard drives or in the cloud these days — but AddictingGames.com is an approximation that comes to mind.)
That means some well-produced games, like Tomb of the Mask, can do things like save your progress. Others restart each time you open the game on Playables. Some include controls designed for keyboard inputs, and others make you toggle between the trackpad and the mouse.
Besides a few highlights like Tomb of the Mask, Angry Birds Showdown, and Cut the Rope, there are tens of extremely cheap games that aren’t very enjoyable to play on the desktop. (Draw Climber, Lunch Box Ready, and Color Match are a few examples of the, uh, less polished options on Playables.) They’re also a bummer to play on the mobile app since the interface cuts off about one-tenth of the screen and has no full-screen mode. The browser version’s full-screen mode simply enlarges the browser to fill the screen, rather than just the game, as if it were a YouTube video.
I can’t knock YouTube for finding a way to make some of these games easily and legally playable (ha) on a browser sans ads — crushing a few levels of any given web-based game between meetings brings me right back to
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