Google now lets you launch and play games directly from search results

Some of you might recall that one of the features Google introduced to Search on mobile are Instant Apps. For those unfamiliar, Instant Apps is where users can look up apps and instantly launch a small but functional preview of the app without having to download it to your phone first.

Now it looks like Google is giving the same treatment for video games. As noted by Bryant Chappel of The Nerf Report, it seems that Google has updated Search where users looking for video games will actually be able to launch and start playing that game directly from search results.

This seems to be primarily aimed at gamers who stream their games and so far, it appears to work for Google’s Stadia (obviously), Amazon’s Luna, NVIDIA’s GeForce Now, and Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming. Given that one of the benefits of game streaming is that it isn’t necessarily hardware dependent, it means that it can be played in browsers, so it makes sense that gamers can search for games and launch it within their browsers.

It looks like the Google search engine has a new update for cloud gaming platforms!!!

When searching for a game players can now launch a game directly from the search results utilizing @GoogleStadia. pic.twitter.com/xblOsBpF6O

— Bryant Chappel (@BryantChappel) August 11, 2022

Keep in mind that gamers will still be required to own an account with either of these streaming services. In some cases, like Stadia, you will also need to own the game in order to play, so it’s not as if you can search and play any game you want for free, but it might still be a useful feature for gamers anyway.

We’re not sure how widespread this feature is, and it is possible that it is server-side enabled so if you don’t see it yet, then maybe the feature hasn’t been enabled for you yet.