Capcom has released a Resident Evil Village demo driven by Google’s Stadia cloud gaming technology, which allows people to try out the horror game in a browser. In a press release, Google says the idea is to let people try the game, no matter what device they have. The game and its demo were already available to Stadia subscribers, but now anyone can try it for free, as long as they have a compatible web browser and an internet connection of more than 10 megabits per second. You don’t even need a Google Account; just browse the website, enter your birthday (the game has an M score) and click the play button.
As for the demo aspect … you will definitely get what you pay for with your browser version. Below are a few images comparing it to the Stadia version of the demo on the left and the PS5 version on the right (the PS5 version runs at 4K, the Capcom demo reaches 1080P).
The images in the scene look relatively similar. When it comes to gaming, however … to quote another of my co-workers he tried Stadia’s demo: “I tried it. It looks like shit lol”
However, as someone who cares mostly about history and the game, I admit that the show did its job to let me know what Village is all about. And while it’s not as nice to watch as the PS5 version, I didn’t have to spend about 10 minutes downloading 8GB of data to play or worry about your computer’s capabilities: I clicked the button and in about 90 seconds I was playing the game (and in three minutes, I knew it was too creepy to spend money on it). That said, the demo’s landing page warns that playing it “can use a lot of data” depending on how long you play it. (The one-hour time limit in other versions of the demo has been removed, although the content of the demo is the same, according to Google.)
Resident Evil Village is not the first game to receive Stadia’s demo treatment. Recently, AT&T gave its customers access to streaming versions of Batman: Arkham Knight and Control Ultimate Edition using a white-label version of Stadia that ran on Google technology but had the operator’s brand. While Google also allows Stadia subscribers to try out games, it looks like the service has more of a future as a white label product that companies like Capcom can use for demonstrations, rather than a standalone gaming service like Nvidia’s GeForce Now .