You have, on your iPhone, approximately 4,837 ways of playing games. There’s Apple Arcade, there are some browser games, there’s the Xbox streaming app, the PlayStation streaming app, and Nvidia GeForce Now that you can access through Safari — the list, in fact, goes on. Now, however, there’s a new way to play games, and it’s through an app you probably already have installed on your best iPhone.
The YouTube app will now let you play “more than 75 games” “directly from YouTube”, including some returning classics like Angry Birds Showdown, Cut the Rope, and Trivia Crack. YouTube Playables, as it's called, is coming to both iOS and Android for all users of the app, and it sounds incredibly easy to access.
A library of free games
To get started, simply open the YouTube app, find the explore menu, and select the ‘Playables’ option. From there, you’ll find all 75 games that the platform has to offer, completely free. From our testing, there are no adverts that get in the way of gameplay, although that could change in the future — nothing, after all, is truly free.
Apart from some big-name titles, the rest of the lineup is fairly unremarkable, although YouTube says it's going to add more over time to make for a more compelling list. There are some gems to discover of course: In just a few seconds of scrolling, I’d quickly found some games perfect for killing time on the bus.
Considering most game platforms on iOS and Android want to charge you to play games, it’s refreshing to have a free one — and if YouTube manages to make the game selection even better, you could have one of the best ways to play games on your phone. It’s an extra bonus that it’s built into an app that you already have as well, so you don’t need to install anything new.
