What you need to know
- Google has been spotted allowing some users to fire up cloud games directly in Search.
- The feature seems to be working with Stadia, Amazon Luna, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and GeForce Now.
- However, the experience is not as frictionless as you might expect.
Firing up cloud games might soon require less effort courtesy of a new feature that Google appears to be testing, allowing you to begin streaming games directly from search results.
The new feature has been spotted by Bryant Chappel (opens in new tab) of The Nerf Report, and it appears to work with not just Stadia, but also third-party cloud gaming platforms. Chappel demonstrated how some games, such as Control Ultimate Edition, can be fired up with just a single click from search results (via The Verge (opens in new tab)).
Besides Stadia, the feature apparently supports Amazon Luna, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and NVIDIA GeForce Now. In a video shared by Chappel on Twitter, searching for a game title brings up a right-side information box showing the platforms where it is available, along with a “Play” button. Clicking it will either reroute you to a landing page or launch the game within your browser.
The experience is not as smooth as you might expect, though, since you need to be signed in to an account associated with any of the best game streaming apps in order to start up a game. There are prompts that you need to click as well before you’re able to play.
That said, the feature is not showing up for a lot of people, suggesting that this is part of an A / B testing. There’s no word on when it will be rolled out, but it will certainly address one of the pain points of playing cloud games, which aren’t as easy to launch as one would hope.
Android Central has reached out to Google for comment and will update this article when we hear back.
