YouTube Playables doesn’t yet have the games to compete with Apple

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

To comply with Apple’s App Store regulations, the YouTube app must cannot compete directly with the App Store itself – that is, it can’t sell apps or games. So instead, Google’s YouTube offers free games within the app itself, and the throttled experience does little to create competition to the free games in 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, that’s probably because most games these days are stored on our hard drives or in the cloud – but AddictingGames.com is an approximation that comes to mind.)

This means that some well-produced games, such as Tomb of the Maskfor example, can save your progress. Others will restart every time you open the game on Playables. Some include controls for keyboard input, and others let you switch between the trackpad and the mouse.

In addition to some highlights such as Tomb of the Mask, Angry Birds ShowdownAnd Cut the ropethere are dozens of extremely cheap games that aren’t much fun on the desktop. (Drawing climbers, Ready for the lunchboxAnd Color matching are some examples of the, uh, less polished Options for playable games.) It’s also a bummer to play on the mobile app, as the UI cuts off about a tenth of the screen and has no fullscreen mode. The browser version’s fullscreen mode simply enlarges the browser to fill the screen, rather than just the game, as if it were a YouTube video.

Image: Happymagenta UAB/Playgendary via Polygon

I can’t criticize YouTube for finding a way to make some of these games easily and legally (ha) playable in a browser without ads — beating a few levels of any web-based game between meetings makes me feel like I’m back in the computer lab in the mid-2000s, in a good way — but with the advent of Steam, this move feels more like Google signaling to Apple that it’s still here to compete in the digital games market than a move that benefits gamers. I might play some of these. Tomb of the Mask in YouTube’s web browser, but I certainly won’t be playing it on YouTube’s mobile app since that’s available for free on the App Store. To keep my progress in one place, I’ll just keep playing on my iPhone.

There’s still a lot of room for improvement in terms of the UI. Currently, you can only filter your Playables games by “Home,” which shows the games you’ve played, and “Browse,” which shows all the 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.

This, and the poor selection of titles, speaks to one of the main reasons the Google Play Store has failed to win out against Apple’s App Store: curation. I have access to both marketplaces and consistently find Google’s marketplace to be chock-full of crappy games that exist primarily to draw attention to the ads hosted within the games.

The App Store has this problem too, but Apple is known for being very particular about which apps are allowed on the store, especially when it comes to privacy and data collection. This means that games with higher production value, meaning teams with more money and time to go through Apple’s review process, are more likely to end up on both marketplaces, while low-budget games that are quick hits may only end up on the Play Store.

I expect Playables to see a lot more traction in the coming months, which means many of these initial complaints may subside. I’m particularly curious to see if YouTube releases any new games, which would make an even more compelling argument for me to invest more time in the platform. And while I think these Playables are a clever and nifty way to get people to play Google Play Store games on iPhones, I don’t think it’s going to push the industry one way or the other – at least not in its current state.