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Google Stadia adds free trials for 'Control' and 'Riders Republic'

You can play Ubisoft's new game for free for up to two hours.

Engadget

Back in October, Google Stadia introduced free trials with its Hello Engineer game. While the service lets users claim any game they want in the Stadia Pro library with a $10-per-month subscription, free users typically can't try a title first before purchase.* Now, according to 9to5Google, Stadia is giving free users the opportunity to take two more games for a spin before they have to buy them. One of those games is Control: Ultimate Edition, which recently just came out for the platform.

Ultimate Edition contains the core Control game, along with the expansions that were released for it. Like Hello Engineer, players will be able to test it out for 30 minutes before they have to decide whether to pay $40 for a copy. The other game is Ubisoft's recently released Riders Republic, a massively multiplayer extreme sports game, where teams can battle each other on bikes, skis, snowboards and in flying wingsuits. Players will get the chance to try it out for two hours instead of just 30 minutes, perhaps because half an hour might barely be enough to cover tutorials when there are several extreme sports to choose from. Besides, Riders Republic isn't cheap and costs $60 to purchase.

With the addition of these two games, we can probably expect Google to make more titles available for free trial in the future. It could be an effective way to get people who'd rather own the titles they play interested in purchasing from Stadia instead of from other gaming platforms.

Update 11/04/21 9:00 ET: Google has clarified to Engadget that it had offered free trials for users before Hello Engineer. In 2020, it offered free demos for Immortals Fenyx Rising and HUMANKIND. Earlier this year, users were able to trial Resident Evil Village.