YouTube reportedly testing online gaming

YouTube is testing an online gaming product among employees, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

According to the paper, citing internal company communications, the Alphabet-owned video site is testing a new product called Playables, with games including arcade game Stack Bounce being tested internally.

The Journal reported that games can be played on the video-sharing site via web browsers or on Android and iOS devices.

The paper said that CEO Neal Mohan is keen to push into new growth areas to offset a slowing in the ad market.

Mohan, formerly YouTube’s chief product officer, who took over from previous CEO Susan Wojcicki earlier this year, talked about the wider appeal of gaming-related content when he set out priorities for the platform in March, highlighting that top gaming creators “helped build incredible momentum – we saw more than two trillion gaming-related views on our platform in 2022”.

Among initiatives he mentioned at the time in a blog was one to enable viewers to remix clips into YouTube’s Shorts offering and add features that make it easy to “recompose the best of gaming content to Shorts”.

In October last year YouTube hired former Google Play director of global games and play partnerships Leo Olebe, who had also previously worked as senor global director of games partnership at Facebook, to head up its YouTube Gaming division following the departure of global head of gaming Ryan Watt and head of gaming creators Lester Chen.