YouTube reportedly testing Playables, an instant online gaming service

According to a Wall Street Journal report, YouTube has begun testing a service called Playables, which makes simple online games playable “instantly” within the YouTube website and app. Google’s employees were invited to start testing the game via an email.

According to reports, one of the games available for testing has been named Stack Bounce. This sounds like Breakout clone, with players aiming “to smash layers of bricks with a bouncing ball.” The Wall Street Journal says the Playables test is composed of “simple, easily shareable games.”

There’s no word of the business model for Playables, nor of how the service works. It sounds strikingly similar to the YouTube integration that was planned for Google’s ambitious cloud gaming platform Stadia, which shut down in January after just three years in operation. YouTube viewers were to have the ability to seamlessly and instantly switch between watching a YouTube playthrough to actually playing it themselves.

When Stadia’s closure was announced, platform boss Phil Harrison said that Google saw “clear opportunities to apply this technology across other parts of Google,” citing YouTube. Playables could well be a way for Google to repurpose Stadia’s investment in streaming tech, although the games offered for the test sound much simpler than those on the Stadia platform (and, arguably, less well matched to the YouTube gaming audience, which isn’t known for its love of casual gaming).

The new Facebook game, Playables (remember), sounds more similar to the old version. FarmVille?) than a cloud gaming platform to rival Xbox or Nvidia — and Google’s history with getting directly involved in gaming is checkered, to say the least. The tech giant’s other division may have more luck.