Google Stadia has been thrown a lifeline, with support soon coming to a host of Android TV and Google TV devices, including the new Chromecast with Google TV streaming stick.
Google has confirmed that, as of June 23, the Stadia streaming service for games will finally come to the Nvidia Shield TV and TV Pro streaming boxes, the Philips OLED+935 and OLED 805 TVs, the Philips 8215 and 8505 LCD screens, Hisense U7G, U8G and U9Q TVs, Onn FHD and UHD streaming sticks, as well as the Xiaomi MIBOX 3 and MIBOX4 streamers.
The support comes shortly after Apple TV made its way to most recent Android TV devices, and it seems that Google (which develops the Android operating system across phones, tablets and TVs) is really looking to push its OS to the next level.
If you have an Android TV device not listed above, then you won’t have official support just yet – though Google tells us that “you can opt into experimental support to play Stadia. While this feature is still in development and not every Android TV OS device will work perfectly, you can now try out Stadia and play your favorite games on more screens than ever before.”
So, it might not fully work on your Sony TV just yet, but the impatient among you may wish to jump the gun and try out the Stadia service anyhow by heading to the Play Store on your device.
Is Stadia here to stay-dia?
The game streaming service has somewhat disappeared from the news cycle (or hype cycle) amid the flurry of players trying to buy a next-gen console like the PS5 or Xbox Series X – but this big rollout of support could help Stadia’s fortunes.
Stadia had already come to LG TVs earlier in the year, and it is set to get a bucketload of games before 2021 is out. It’s already available on a host of Android phones, of course, as well as PC.
Whether Google is really looking to push Stadia much further, though, remains to be seen. In early 2021 the company closed its in-house game development studio, ostensibly to focus resources on developing the quality of the platform itself – something that’s even seen a lawsuit filed in the US over “false and misleading claims concerning the streaming quality of Stadia’s service.”
Game streaming certainly appears to be the future, even if the PS Now service jumped in a bit early, and Xbox Cloud Gaming has yet to really unlock its full potential to the gaming public. Where Stadia fits in amidst all this isn’t overly clear, even a year and half after the platform’s initial launch – and that’s something that won’t be answered with a quick Google.