You can try a demo of Blades of Excalibur, an action fighting game from Kabam, without even leaving the YouTube video window. How cool is that?
Blades of Excalibur, an English localization of China's most popular game of 2013, will be available next month. The demo is a fairly simple hack-n-slash with roughly the sophistication of a Super Nintendo-era side-scroller. The interesting part is that it's hosted entirely within YouTube.
It's a small first step, but what if more complex games could be embedded into preview videos just like this? If, while watching a trailer or bit of gameplay for an upcoming game, the video paused and let you take over the controls for a bit. Sure, it might not be a full representation of the final game, but such a feature could give gamers a hands-on taste of how a game feels and plays when they least expect it.
If a cloud-based game streaming service like OnLive or Gaikai were integrated within YouTube, it could conceivably play higher-end console games via streaming. The site already hosts more than a billion unique viewers each month, so it would seem a natural extension of the idea.
But to me, that isn't even the most interesting possibility. I would argue that the average gamer has an inherent knowledge and understanding of most games that would come from a big budget publisher. Specific details aside, most first-person shooters play about the same. But what about indie games, where unique and innovative gameplay methods are common?
Oftentimes, some creative gameplay mechanic is a game's biggest draw, but also the hardest thing to demonstrate in a video. Take Jonathan Blow's acclaimed puzzle game Braid: A video can show that the flow of time can be controlled, but the actual implications of how that mechanic can be used are difficult to understand without using it yourself.
At the same time, most indies come with minuscule system requirements, as compared to triple-A blockbusters. In that case, maybe rendering a streaming gameplay demo natively in a browser in the middle of a YouTube video might not be difficult at all.
