With the world getting drawn into the hype around the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft, it’s perhaps another reminder that people still like their physical devices. Google has been trying to convince the gaming world otherwise that the future is in gaming from the cloud. And while I do believe they are right, I do think it’s a future that many people are not quite prepared for just yet as Google’s poor handling of Stadia’s pricing and games that actually work on it, certainly hasn’t helped.
Despite the platforms many limitations though, Google is still heavily invested in Stadia and wants to conquer yet another hurdle by opening it up to more Android devices. Google is experimentally opening support to any Android phone that can install the Stadia app, which means most devices with Android 6.0 or later should fit the bill. This means that pretty much most phones out there can now make use of Stadia. Whether they’ll want to is another matter entirely and Google still has a lot more convincing to do. Even if just downloading and trying out the service is free.
One of the things Google is hoping will help, is the new official touchscreen controls that will work on all mobile devices (as announced in a recent blog post). It looks quite cluttered as it tries to provide all the functionality of a normal controller but it does at least mean that people can play more games without the need of an additional controller. Though I’m sure people will probably want a controller once they realise their fingers and buttons are getting in the way of all that is happening onscreen.
None of this solves stadia’s biggest problems which are the latency of its servers, buggy platform, poor games and cost, but hopefully they keep working to resolve those issues.
Last Updated: June 12, 2020
