Sounds like some Google exec recently discovered Adobe Flash and wants to relive the heyday of Newgrounds. I guess if it gets us a new Hedgehog Launch or Crush the Castle it won't be all bad. Just have to wonder if the games will survive the inevitable closing down of the project in a couple years?
It actually kind of makes sense if it's using stadia technology. You hit up your favorite streamer, and then if you want to play the same game they can spin up a window for you regardless of your PC specs.
Seems half-baked. Are they trying to resurrect the flash game? It could work as a standalone thing, but I don't see why it needs to be part of YouTube other than the fact they're going to shove it in our faces just like they did their TikTok clone.
Youtube had this feature a decade ago, if you pressed the down key while the video was loading you could play Snake.
But seriously, is this like Stadia where you can stream the games or similar to Flash (or itch.io as a more modern example), where the games will run inside the client browser?
Imagine that. Just going on YouTube, searching for a game, pick up your controller and just play. Like no installation and no loading times. That sounds like the future! But yeah, I guess there are some issues that needs to be ironed out before we’re there.
Isn’t that what Stadia was supposed to be? We have the tech, people are just so skeptical of Google (with good reason) that the project died.
As for what they are talking about here, it seems they are trying to replace the old flash game sites. It could work, but I think they might be butting up against the mobile market more than they realize with this.
Stadia was basically a game console as a service, assuming you had good enough internet. You had to pay for the subscription for access, then pay for each game individually. The one benefit of that was very little initial barrier to entry, as you just needed chromecast and a stadia controller.
Youtube playables appears to be just lightweight html5 web app games that run locally in your browser, similar to what flash player was like.