Stadia Will Offer Free Trials A “Few Months” After Launch

Whether not Google’s upcoming Stadia service will lead the charge in the cloud gaming future remains to be seen. Regardless of whether it will or not, there’s been some head scratchers about how Google has handled certain aspects of the service’s roll out. For one, there was a lack of clarity about what Stadia was striving to be, though eventually they pinned it down. And now it seems that Stadia will not have free trials at launch, oddly enough.

In an interview with StadiaCast, Google VP and Stadia Head of Product John Justice confirmed that there would be no free trials at launch, saying that instead they would have some a few months down the road. You can see the full interview below.

“It’ll be a few months until they actually go out,” he said. “I don’t know that I’ve mentioned this to anyone yet, so you might be the first. We will be adding trials.

“We’re just working through what’s the right when and how exactly to set it up and you can imagine how busy things are now just getting ready for launch.

“So, there’s the launch stuff and then there’s, OK, what do we want to do next, next, and next after? And trials are something that’s high up on the list.”

We knew the service was not getting a beta (which is a bit odd in and of itself), but it’s definitely bizarre for any kind of service with a subscription element to offer no free trials out of the gate, especially since trials are one of the key ways companies hook in early adopters to services of this nature. And it’s not entirely clear if Justice is just referring to Stadia Pro trials (the subscription part of Stadia that includes a catalog of games) or something else as well, in relation to the entire platform of Stadia.

Well, either way, when Stadia launches in November, don’t be expecting any free trials with it.