YouTube now has games, but isn’t competing with Apple yet

YouTube launched a new feature on Tuesday: free mobile games that you can play directly in the app or on your desktop. After several months of testing the feature with YouTube Premium subscribers, the sub-100 hybrid gaming platform is now available to all users, and it’s, unsurprisingly, disappointing.

To comply with Apple’s App Store regulations, the YouTube app is available cannot compete directly with the App Store itself – that is, it cannot sell apps or games. So Google’s YouTube instead offers free games in the app itself, and the limited experience does little to compete with even the free games in the App Store. Instead of downloading the games you want to play, Playables essentially functions just like any other website that hosts games. (If you can’t think of one, it’s probably because most games these days are on our hard drives or in the cloud – but AddictingGames.com is an approach that comes to mind.)

That means some well-produced games, like Tomb of the Mask, can do things like save your progress. Others restart every time you open the game on Playables. Some include controls designed for keyboard input, and others let you switch between the trackpad and mouse.

In addition to a few highlights such as Tomb of the Mask, Angry Birds ConfrontationAnd Cut the rope, there are dozens of extremely cheap games that aren’t very fun to play on the desktop. (Sign climber, Lunch box readyAnd Color match are a few examples of the, uh, less polished options on Playables.) They’re also a shame to play on the mobile app, as the interface cuts off about a tenth of the screen and doesn’t have a full-screen mode. The browser version’s full-screen mode simply expands the browser so that it fills the screen, instead of just the game, as if it were a YouTube video.

I can’t beat YouTube for finding a way to make some of these games easily and legally playable (ha) in a browser without ads – if I crash a few levels of a certain web game between meetings I’ll be right back in the computer space in the mid-2000s in a good way, but with the arrival of Steam this move feels more like a signal from Google to Apple that it’s still here to compete in the digital games market than a move in favor of players. Maybe I’ll play some Tomb of the Mask in YouTube’s web browser, but I’m definitely not going to play it in YouTube’s mobile app since it’s free on the App Store. So to keep my progress in one place, I’ll just keep playing on my iPhone.

As far as the interface is concerned, there is a lot of room for improvement. Currently, you can only filter your Playables games by ‘Home’, which shows the games you’ve played, and ‘Browse’, which shows all available games in alphabetical order. You can also search for a game in your YouTube search bar, but you’ll have to wade through a few rows of videos and ads before you get to the Playables module.

That, along with the poor selection of titles, speaks to one of the main reasons why the Google Play Store hasn’t won out against Apple’s App Store: curation. I have access to both marketplaces, and consistently find Google’s marketplace to be overrun with crappy games that are there mainly to watch the ads in the games.

The App Store also has this problem, but Apple is notoriously strict about which apps are allowed in the store, especially when it comes to privacy and data collection. That means games with higher production values, i.e. teams with more money and time to go through the Apple vetting process, are more likely to end up in both markets, while low-budget, fast-paced games may only end up in the Play Store.

I expect Playables to become much busier in the coming months, which means many of these early complaints may disappear. I’m especially curious to see if YouTube releases original games, which would be a much more compelling argument for me to invest more time in the platform. And while I think these Playables are a clever and sneaky way to let people play Google Play Store games on iPhones, I don’t think this will boost the industry one way or another – at least not in the current state.