Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Google Games

Google Adds Instant Cloud-Streaming Button To Web Searches For Games (arstechnica.com) 12

An anonymous reader shares a report: 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.

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. 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."

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Google Adds Instant Cloud-Streaming Button To Web Searches For Games

Comments Filter:
  • Free-to-play shit where games don't good 3d hardware to run and will they hide that that 4K upgrade fee does not unlock any in game stuff at all?

    • by xonen ( 774419 )

      Free-to-play shit where games don't good 3d hardware to run and will they hide that that 4K upgrade fee does not unlock any in game stuff at all?

      I'm not sure why you complain. Pay-to-win is a horrible concept that no-one likes, except a couple of game companies that make money with it. Yet, pay for a 4k upgrade as service sounds perfectly reasonable to me, as you'll use more hardware and bandwidth to do so, and may value the result worth the cost as gamer.

    • Free-to-play shit where games don't good 3d hardware to run and will they hide that that 4K upgrade fee does not unlock any in game stuff at all?

      GeForce Now (a streaming/cloud game service included in the article) allows you to use your own steam library, if so you please. So, none of that "Free-to-play shit" if you do not want it.

      Useful, for exaple, if you want to play a AAA game at launch, but do not have hardware beefy enough to do so (for example, say, a shortage of GPUs)...

  • I miss the old days when you had to wait 20 minutes to load 6 5.25" floppies to play "Raid Over Moscow"...
  • But in my country the ping times are around 75ms (and that depends on the speed of the wavefront of light on a fiber, not on my internet plan) on a wired connection.

    Couple that with mt shitty 2Mbps uplink, and cloud gaming is untenable here, and I guess in many other countries too...

    Sadly, very sadly.

Hotels are tired of getting ripped off. I checked into a hotel and they had towels from my house. -- Mark Guido

Working...