Google Stadia Free Trial Gives You 30 Minutes To See What The Fuss Is About

Game streaming is becoming more or less a staple in the gaming industry, but not everyone is sold on the idea yet. In fact, some might even be apprehensive about trying a 30-day free trial, especially if they're the type that forgets such a trial automatically charges you at the end of the period. For those who just want to dip their toes into that market, Google Stadia is apparently testing a new experiment that gives you half an hour to test if game streaming is for you.

One of the dreams of game streaming is the ability to simply click on an ad for a game and immediately start playing that game. That hasn't happened yet, for better or worse, though Google Play's Instant games come close to that vision on Android. That idealized system would have been a good way not only to test a game but also to test whether you have the hardware or Internet connection to support that game.

Google might be testing out that idea by playing around with a new type of free trial for Stadia. The game streaming service confirmed to The Verge that it is running an experiment where Stadia semi-randomly offers a game to try for a short period of time. That time period is currently limited to 30-minute sessions, but that could also change, depending on Stadia's whims.

Unlike Stadia's normal 30-day free trial, the entire library isn't available for testing. Only one game at a time will be offered, currently Hello Engineer. Different testers, however, might see other titles, but this experiment hasn't become widely available just yet.

One other key difference with this new free trial is that it only requires signing into a Google account and nothing else. You will still have to go through a couple of pages of notices and confirmations, but that still beats having to provide payment information before getting a game streaming appetizer. It's still not as instant, but Stadia might eventually move towards that model if this experiment turns out to be successful in turning testers into paying subscribers.