Friction is the mind-killer in the case of cloud gaming. You can’t simply click on a sport trailer to immediately be enjoying a sport fairly but. But this week, Google seems to be rolling out a function that would scale back that friction: for those who merely seek for the title of a sport in Google search, you could be introduced with a “Play” button that may immediately launch the title.

The Nerf Report’s Bryant Chappel seems to be the one who noticed the change, and he shortly found it’s not restricted to Google’s personal Stadia cloud gaming service, both. He says it really works with Amazon Luna, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Nvidia’s GeForce Now, too.

There’s nonetheless friction — you want to be logged into an account that’s related to these cloud gaming companies or else you’ll simply get a signup web page, and there should be intermediate prompts. Also, it doesn’t seem to work with all video games.

But with Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming, at the least, a single click on from a Google search end result will take you simply so far as you get by navigating to the web site of your favourite cloud gaming service, selecting your title, and urgent the play button you’d discover there.

Screenshots by Sean Hollister / The Verge

It’s not clear when or if Google will totally roll out this function. We initially noticed it reside this afternoon, however out of the blue it was gone and doesn’t seem in our search outcomes anymore. Then it got here again for me, however just for my Google Workspace account, which isn’t related to any cloud gaming companies and might’t play Google Stadia in any respect. Chappel confirms to The Verge that he’s nonetheless seeing it working from his house in Austin, Texas. 9to5Google saw it as properly.

My guess is that Google is operating an A / B check with this function to see how folks react. Or perhaps it jumped the gun, not in contrast to GeForce Now in 2020, by rolling it out with out the permission of sport studios.

Google didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.