Google has steadily been perking up the feature set of its cloud game streaming service, Stadia, ever since its launch last year. It has added a bunch of new game titles and even offered Stadia Pro for free to everyone during the quarantine. Today, Google has taken a huge step to expand Stadia to all Android phones and enabled mobile touch controls for gaming on the move.
Stadia Runs on Any Android Phone
Yeah, you read that right. In its latest “This Week on Stadia” blog post, Google revealed that users can now try out Stadia on almost any Android phone. If it’s possible to install the Stadia mobile app on your device, then you can try out the cloud gaming service.
To play Stadia games on any Android phone, just follow the steps below:
1. Download the Stadia app. Sign in and look for the ‘Experiments’ tab in the Settings menu.
2. Under the ‘Experiments’ tab, you need to enable the “Play on this device” and you’re ready to stream games from the cloud.
“While this feature is still in development and not every phone will work perfectly, you can now try out Stadia and play your favorite games on more screens than ever before,” says the blog post. Since Stadia is not available in India right now, we weren’t able to test out this feature.
This is apart from the 38 officially supported Android phones. The list added a myriad of older OnePlus phones, including the OnePlus 5/ 5T, OnePlus 6/ 6T, OnePlus 7/ 7 Pro, and OnePlus 7T/ 7T Pro (including 5G variant) just this week. You can check out the complete list of supported devices right here.
Mobile Touch Controls
One of the most important additions to Stadia comes in the form of on-screen touch controls for mobile users. You no longer need to carry a controller on you at all times. Instead, when you power up a game going forward, the app will prompt the ‘Try touch gamepad’ option on your screen. Enable this to experience a much more refined mobile gaming experience on the move.
In addition, the Stadia mobile app will now enable you to set individual resolutions for every device that you use to stream games. This means you can set your TV to stream games at 4K resolution while the mobile device could be at 720p to conserve data. The blog post also shines a light on this month’s free games – SUPERHOT, Get Packed, Little Nightmares, Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid, and Panzer Dragoon: Remake.
