YouTube testing the waters for Flash-based game demos

Newsbrief: Social game company Kabam is hosting a preview version of its upcoming free-to-play Flash game Blades of Excalibur on YouTube, suggesting that Google's video platform has added web game host to its growing list of functions. Creative developers have used YouTube's annotation feature to create choose-your-own-adventure video games on the platform for years, but Blades of Excalibur is a bit different -- it's a real-time action Flash game running on a YouTube page. The preview version is a simple side-scrolling beat-em-up with keyboard controls in which you can either play through a simple single-player story mode or fight other players in real-time via an arena mode. The full game, which is actually a localized version of the Chinese F2P web game Three Kingdoms Action, will be released in the U.S. sometime next month as part of Kabam's initiative to fund foreign developers of popular games who wish to bring their work to Western markets.