Google Search now shows which streaming services have specific games

Kyle Bradshaw | Aug 11 2022 - 10:10 am PT

Google Search will now show you what cloud streaming services have a particular video game, building on existing support for movies, TV, and music.

For years now, Google Search has acted as an aggregator of the world’s streaming services. If you want to watch a particular show, you can use Google Search or Google TV to get accurate info about what services it’s on. For example, searching for The Simpsons reveals that the show can be streamed from a variety of apps, including Disney+ and Hulu, or purchased from multiple stores.

In the last few days, Google Search has expanded this capability to include support for video games. However, rather than including links to various consoles’ storefronts or to the many PC gaming retailers, Google is strictly focusing on cloud gaming.

This makes perfect sense, given Google has skin in the game thanks to Stadia and Google Cloud’s Immersive Stream. Of course, as you’d hope, Google Search isn’t only surfacing results from Stadia, with confirmed support for Amazon Luna, Nvidia GeForce Now, and Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Oddly enough, the list of services seems to vary between desktop and mobile. Searching for “Destiny 2” on Android only brings up a result for Stadia, while the same search on desktop shows both GeForce Now and Stadia.

But that’s not to say Stadia isn’t getting a tiny bit of special treatment. On mobile, when a game has a free trial through Stadia, the page switches the text from black to green to show “Trial available.” Otherwise, Google Search simply shows when a game is “Free” (like Fortnite on Xbox, or Destiny 2 on Stadia) or if you can only stream it with a “Premium subscription” (as is the case for games on Luna).

Clicking the “Play” button on the Google Search results page launches directly into that service’s store in the app, if possible. This seems to work well for Stadia, but not for Game Pass which doesn’t seem to have link-based launching on Android today.

We’ve suspected for a few months now that Google was preparing to aggregate cloud gaming services like this. Our earliest hint came when Google began preparing the ChromeOS launcher to show cloud gaming titles when searching. This could’ve made sense as an exclusive feature for ChromeOS, given the platform’s cloud-ready nature, but it’s great to see this information be widely available.