When Cory Burdette awoke recently to learn that Winter Storm Gia had caused a two-hour school delay in Reston, Va., he seized the chance to do a little family bonding. Plopping down in front of the TV, Burdette and his 5-year-old daughter spent the morning together playing Minecraft, the Lego-like adventure game where players construct buildings out of virtual blocks. "We play all our games together on the Xbox," he said. "In Minecraft, we both get to build a house together, find monsters and explore." The first time he fired up the game, Burdette had to wait for Minecraft to download and install on his Xbox before launching it.

As recently as five years ago, the advent of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube Premium sounded the death knell for multi-billion dollar businesses, altered the living-room habits of millions of people, and changed studio production structures permanently. Companies that adapted survived, and the viewing audience received a handful of clear benefits in return -- most notably the ability to watch high-quality shows and movies on demand and, most recently, an explosion of award-winning, culturally transformative entertainment options. The idea of a "Netflix for games" service has been floating around since long before video-streaming became a thing, but it hasn't found a solid foothold quite yet. Streaming games is a more complicated process than streaming video, since it adds user input to the mix. While being piped into a player's home or phone from a server that could be hundreds of miles away, the game has to respond, without lag, to every button press a player makes.

If you've been waiting to pick up Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, now is your chance to get it without spending a dime. Google is giving away a free copy of the title for PC in exchange for trying out Project Stream, the company's game streaming service for Chrome. The giveaway is only available to US residents, and you'll have until January 15th to rack up an hour of playtime. Your copy of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey will be gifted to you on Ubisoft's Uplay platform. You'll have to link your Project Stream account in order to receive it, and all of the progress you made via Google' streaming platform will be transfered to your copy of the game.

There's a specific kind of frustration associated with crappy game-streaming services. It's all about the buildup: You find a game, whether it's something brand new or a long-lost childhood favorite, and boot it up. It takes forever to load. The title screen stutters and your heart drops, but it's easy to convince yourself it was just a bout of preliminary jitters. And then the game begins.

Google is offering a limited number of gamers the chance to play popular video game Assassin's Creed Odyssey free of charge via its Chrome browser. In a blogpost outlining its plans for Project Stream, the search engine said it wanted to take streaming to "the next level". But it admitted there were technical challenges involved in streaming graphically rich content via a browser. One expert said it was a bold move from Google to grab gaming revenue. According to analyst company IHS Markit, global spending on games content and services is expected to reach $129bn (£99bn) this year.

Google has unveiled a radical new streaming service it hopes will one day replace games consoles. Called Project Stream, it will let users stream games in real time to Google's Chrome browser. The firm is partnering with Ubisoft to test the service with their soon-to-be released Assassin's Creed Odyssey, with the game running on Google's servers, but being streamed live and controlled by users over a web connection. Google is developing a subscription-based game streaming service that could work either on its Chromecast or a Google-made console. The plan that Google has been working on involves use of its cloud servers to broadcast the games to users over the internet.