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First discovered by Bryant Chappel of The Nerf Report and then demonstrated on Twitter, you can now perform a Google Search for any game to see if it’s available on one of the popular cloud gaming services that have come to dominance in the past few years. If you find that the Knowledge Panel for a game is available on Google Stadia or Nvidia GeForce NOW, for example, all you’ll need to do is press the ‘Play’ button found there to be instantaneously launched into the platform it exists on.
Google and its competitors continue to try new methods of reducing friction for new users to adopt their services, and among them, Google has been the most innovative in its attempts. From over 100 click-to-play game trials becoming available recently with no need to even sign up or log in to the ability to share web URLs with friends to thrust them into the game world instantaneously, it’s chief among forward thinkers in the cloud gaming space despite how much naysayers like to hate on it.
In this latest effort, Stadia isn’t just playing favorites with its own gaming initiative (because that would provide them with another anti-trust lawsuit) and you can click to launch games in Xbox Cloud Gaming and Amazon Luna as well as those aforementioned.
There’s no doubt that this process now being baked directly into Google Search is why we recently saw ChromeOS gain mention of a gaming panel in its launcher, even though it hasn’t really fully taken form yet. It’s my hope that it progresses further to include game cover art and a direct ‘Play’ button as well just as Search has basically done.
The best part is that these games and their information are maintained by the world wide web, so scraping box art and metadata is a task automatically taken on by Google itself. I hope that in the future, Google adds more cloud gaming features directly into its other apps and services, and continues to think in fresh ways about how it can innovate where others have simply followed established trends.
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