Key Takeaways
- YouTube Playables now offers multiplayer support for select titles.
- Ludo Club and Magic Tiles 3 are the two games that currently offer multiplayer functionality.
- YouTube plans to expand multiplayer support to more games in the future.
After the early death of Stadia, Google diverted its gaming focus to Playables — its bite-sized cloud games platform available directly on YouTube. The tech giant first started testing Playables back in September 2023, and the gaming experience started appearing for Premium users later in the same year.
Earlier this year, Playables expanded to non-paying users, with over 75 lite games added to the service — available to play completely free of cost. Now the streaming giant has announced multiplayer support for two games in the catalog.
YouTube highlighted the development in a test features and experiments support page post on Monday, December 9, with the two games with multiplayer support already live on both YouTube on the web and the YouTube mobile apps.
According to YouTube, the two titles that currently offer multiplayer functionality are Ludo Club and Magic Tiles 3. I can independently confirm that multiplayer support is live in Ludo Club, but not in Magic Tiles 3, at least on my end.
YouTube has almost doubled its Playables catalog since May
Apart from the two games, YouTube also hinted at expanded multiplayer support for more titles, alongside other new features to come. “We’re just getting started testing out new features for YouTube Playables with more to come in the future,” reads its support page post.
To access YouTube’s games on the web, look for Playables on the left-aligned Explore bar. On Android and iOS, tap the Explore compass icon on the top left and tap on Playables. As of right now, the gaming experience offers access to over 130 titles.
In other YouTube-related news, the streaming platform is rolling out a new translucent bottom bar for its Android app, soon after it tweaked its bottom bar icons. The change, which is rolling out as part of YouTube for Android v19.47, highlights the color of the YouTube feed hidden behind the translucent bar, giving the app a slightly cleaner look. Elsewhere, on the web, users can now expect to see more granular playback controls — ones that will allow you to adjust playback speed in 0.05x increments.