The earliest sales pitch for Stadia, the Google streaming service that beams high-end video games to web browsers via the cloud, included the idea that it might work as simply as Googling your favorite game. You might search for a popular game to learn more about it, only to immediately see an option to start playing it inside your web browser, no additional hardware required—and perhaps no payment, either.
Nearly three years after Stadia’s official launch—and 18 months after the service’s massive internal downgrade—that scenario has finally begun to play out. What’s more, the feature appears to be streamer-agnostic, as multiple Stadia-like streaming services have started appearing in search results.
Oh, look, Stadia trials get a slightly spiffier font
That’s a handy way to learn that Destiny 2 is immediately playable in my web browser… entirely for free… on more than one compatible service!
These results appear only if you search for the full name “Control Ultimate Edition.”
If you remove “Ultimate Edition” from the query, only Amazon Luna’s entry for the game appears. Hmm.
No Stadia? No problem. Google will direct you to search results even when a game’s instant-streaming version is exclusively available on a single rival’s platform.
Fortnite: not on Stadia, but Google will help you play it on your web browser, anyway.
Scroll down a bit to get to the first Hellblade game.
What a handy free-to-play shortcut.
This week, Google rolled out a limited launch of a “Play Now” tab that appears on searches for select video games on desktop browsers. (As of press time, out of three Google accounts tested, the search results shown in this article only appear on one of them.) This tab can be found in the right-hand “knowledge panel” that is otherwise automatically populated with user reviews, game details, and digital download purchase links.
When a Google game search returns a Play Now tab, it will include as many compatible streaming services as possible, including Google Stadia, Microsoft Xbox Cloud Gaming, Amazon Luna, and Nvidia GeForce Now. (My searches for many PlayStation-exclusive games on that console’s Plus Premium cloud-streaming selection have thus far come up short.) Each entry shows what kind of fee may be required to play the game. Conveniently enough, many Google Stadia games can now be played for free for the first 30 minutes or as long as 120 minutes, and supported free-trial Stadia games get a bright-green flash of italicized text: “trial available.” Other games and services that have appeared thus far have included tags like “premium subscription” or “free-to-play.”
Some search results elevate this tab to a valuable “above the fold” placement, visible without a single scroll of a mouse wheel, while others require scrolling through roughly one full desktop-sized page to find the streaming links. Once you click a service’s “play” button, Google will whisk you to the streaming service’s web portal to immediately begin playing. The action requires signing into the respective service, which means this isn’t quite the “search and immediately play” scenario you might imagine—though thanks to Stadia’s use of Google accounts, it’s arguably the fastest option of the four integrated services thus far.
And in great news, Google has been careful to double-check any Play Now game that is labeled “free-to-play.” No payment method is required to start playing games with the label, which thus far include Fortnite, PUBG Battlegrounds, and Destiny 2.
Playing the games
As a new feature, its biggest failing is how many games don’t show up on Play Now. Many major games in the Stadia catalog are clearly recognized as video games in Google’s knowledge panel interface, yet someone at Google has failed to connect the dots between the Stadia catalog spreadsheet and the new Play Now feature. In a few hilarious cases, Google displays Play Now buttons only for rivals’ services, even when the game in question can either be purchased or tested for free on Stadia.
So far, sadly, a similar “play it right now” feature has yet to land on YouTube, despite Google going so far as to float such a concept in the service’s pre-release hype period in 2018.
Microsoft is likely not far behind in getting its also-ran search engine Bing into similar game-streaming territory. As of press time, Bing results for Xbox Cloud Gaming titles like Fortnite and Halo Infinite deliver similar one-click “play” shortcuts for select users, though only for Xbox Cloud Streaming (which could incur the ire of watchdogs and regulators). While we’ve seen screenshots of convenient green “PLAY” buttons next to those games on other users’ Bing searches, we’ve been unable to replicate the result in our own Bing tests.
This week’s elevation of Stadia and its rivals to top-of-fold accessibility is a much different “games in the browser” move than we’ve seen from Google, which has famously inserted playable games into both the Google search interface and select Google web products. Pac-Man has previously appeared as both a playable top-of-page “Google Doodle” and as an Easter egg game inside of Google Maps. A 2012 April Fools gag turned Google Maps into a pixelated, low-color universe that resembled the famous Japanese RPG series Dragon Quest. In 2013, the company hid a fully functional version of Atari’s Breakout in Google Images, which turned a slew of image search results into blocks that you could break like in the arcade classic; this hidden game has since been removed from standard Google and relegated to a mirror site.
