‘Play Instantly on Discord’: Fortnite will be Nvidia and Discord’s first instant game demo

Nvidia’s GeForce Now is getting a big upgrade next month — and it’s also part of an intriguing new experiment. Nvidia, Discord, and Epic Games have teamed up for an early test of instant game demos for Discord servers, which could theoretically let you immediately try a game without buying it, downloading it, or signing up for an account.

Sound familiar? That’s probably because instantly try-before-you-buy was the original vision for Gaikai, one of the first cloud gaming services, and Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service also tried it many times by letting you demo games in a web browser or even in Google search. Now, Nvidia will be showing off the idea at Gamescom this week by letting people try Fortnite from within Discord.

“You can simply click a button that says ‘try a game’ and then connect your Epic Games account and immediately jump in and and join the action, and you’ll be playing Fortnite in seconds without any downloads or installs,” says Nvidia product marketing director Andrew Fear.

Here’s a screenshot of what it might look like, from an Nvidia video, which also shows the Fortnite demo is currently limited to a 30-minute free trial:

It doesn’t sound completely frictionless if you still need an Epic Games account to play, and it’s not clear if Nvidia, Epic and Discord will offer the demo outside of Gamescom just yet. Nvidia is calling it a “technology announcement” rather than a confirmed feature, one that’ll hopefully see game publishers and developers reach out if they’re interested in potentially adding it to their games.

After Sony bought Gaikai in 2012, it initially suggested it would offer instant try-before-you-buy game demos on the PlayStation 4 too, but that never happened. Years later, Gaikai’s founder told me that publishers didn’t necessarily want it.