Google Stadia starts offering free 30-minute trials starting with new exclusive game title

Google’s cloud gaming service, Google Stadia, begins offering game-specific 30-minute free trials starting with its new exclusive title, Hello Engineer.

Cloud gaming service Google Stadia is coming up with new ways to attract gamers. Google Stadia now allows gamers free 30-minute trials of entire games by simply signing in through their Google accounts, beginning with its latest exclusive game title Hello Engineer.

The option to play the trial appears on the game’s listing page, underneath the options for Stadia pro. Once the free trial begins, players gain access to the entire game with a Stadia sidebar showing a countdown timer for how long the trial lasts. Interestingly, the timer only counts the time from when the player starts the trial, not the actual playtime. At the end of the trial, Google offers the players to buy the game, with the progress saved until the end of the trial should the payer decide to buy the game. The first game with this free trial, Hello Engineer, officially left early access.

Hello Engineer can be purchased for $19.99 on Stadia and included for free with the Stadia Pro subscription. There is excellent potential for game-specific free trials on Stadia, especially with the lack of a need for massive downloads as the games are streamed and supported on a cloud-based platform.