At the Google for Games Developer Summit, Google Stadia announced that it would be offering free demos and free trials for developers to bring the public at large.
The pitch, in short, sounds like this: For developers, it’s free and easy to bring your games to Google’s cloud platform and put them in front of anyone instantly. For gamers, Stadia is now a place to browse games you might like to try-before-you-buy, no risk whatsoever — and if you like what you’re playing, you can continue playing it as long as you like, wherever you like, for one simple payment at the end of your free trial.
Besides that exciting revelation, Google Stadia will now:
- Let any Stadia game developer offer an instantly accessible free trial of their game that will no longer require you to log into a Stadia account to play — just a couple of clicks from YouTube, a Google Search ad, social media, etc.
- Let people actually browse the Stadia store for those free trials, outright free games, and games to purchase without even needing to log into a Google account, much less Stadia
- Let developers port their Unreal Engine and Unity games to Stadia more easily, with tools like DXVK to automatically translate DirectX APIs — “so developers don’t have to modify their game renderer at all,” writes Stadia rep Justin Rende
- Let white-label partners like AT&T sign up to take Google’s technology to offer free demos and paid games of their own, a B2B offering now dubbed “Immersive Stream for Games”
This is an exciting announcement from Google Stadia after the service faced some troubling times post-launch. Google is hoping that these adoptions will attract new gamers and players into the fold for what has become a very solid whitelist platform.
(All information was provided by The Verge)