Google Stadia is slowly but surely becoming a fully fledged cloud game streaming service. The company has been adding a bunch of features to Stadia over the past, and now it seems there are a couple more being worked on.
9to5Google did an APK teardown of the Stadia Android app v2.29, and found a couple of new features that Google is working on for the service.
Pre-orders
So far, Google Stadia offers no way to pre-order games on the service. However, 9to5Google has spotted a bunch of references to pre-orders on the Stadia store. The following lines were found by 9to5Google:
Action button to pre-order an item in the store before release. Pre-order A header on the user’s transactions table on a row showing the price of the pre-ordered product. Pre-order amount The confirmation text as a toast after successfully finishing the preorder payment widget. Pre-order successful
Also, according to the report, pre-ordered games will likely show up in the purchases and subscriptions page within Stadia. However, the more interesting thing about this entire mechanism is the payment. Apparently, it seems that Stadia will not charge you for pre-orders until the game actually releases, which means you can easily cancel your pre-order prior to the game’s release and not have to wait for a refund.
Messages
Also discovered within the APK is more evidence of Google bringing Messaging capabilities to Stadia. There are strings referring to actions such as re-sending and un-sent message, and notifications for new messages, etc.
Status text shown alongside a failed outgoing message to let the user know it was not sent, and they can tap it to try again. Not Sent. Tap message to try again. The title of the notification channel used for messaging notifications. Shown in the notification system UI. Messaging The description of the notification category used for messaging. Shown in the notification system UI. Messages sent to you by other Stadia players
Online Status
Stadia is also working towards adding a couple of new online statuses to the service. Accoriding to strings found in the teardown you will be able to set your status to ‘Looking for Party’ and ‘Streaming’ in the near future.
Obviously, since these features are currently under development, there’s no telling when (or if) they might actually become available on Stadia for Android. However, it’s still nice to know what Google has been working on for Stadia, and the pre-orders look like an important part of a game service. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.
