Over the last few months, Stadia has been steadily rolling out free trials to more and more games on the platform. We at Stadia Dosage track a lot of in-game overall leaderboard size growth on this site, and we were curious if we’d be able to notice the trials in this metric. It turns out that there isn’t a great overlap between games with free trials and the small subset of games with public leaderboards. But, the overlap is non-zero!! In particular, both Sniper Elite 4 and Zombie Army 4 have Free Trials that just went live a few weeks ago. Over 2,000 different people have tried the Sniper Elite 4 free trial so far – and it doesn’t appear to be slowing down!
Check out this plot that shows the Sniper Elite 4 leaderboard on Stadia over time.
You can see that the leaderboard had an unexpected growth of 2,000 Stadians in the last 3 weeks (timed exactly when the free trials started). The Sniper Elite 4 trial did get a bit of extra press because it is a mission based demo rather than simply time based. However, the growth also doesn’t seem to be slowing down …yet anyway.
In addition, we can also look at another trial from the same company (that for the game Zombie Army 4) which isn’t part of the mission based trial novelty.
You can see that the Zombie Army 4 leaderboard has also grown by about 1,000 Stadians more than expected since the free trial went live. Note that the Zombie Army 4 leaderboard is about half the overall size of Sniper Elite 4 as well. Again, the leaderboard growth doesn’t appear to have slowed down yet.
These trials are making a noticeable impact (thousands of new trials over the course of just a few weeks) on these two games overall play on Stadia. What is most encouraging is that there (currently at least) doesn’t seem to be a slow down in the uptake of the new trials.
