One of the coolest premises Google’s Stadia operates under is the idea of taking your AAA game titles on the road with you by virtue of playing on a phone or tablet. The problem thus far is the lack of availability on anything other than the Pixel line of phones. With Google’s own handsets making up a very tiny portion of the mobile market, the idea of extending Stadia to more phones is one of the top requests right now. It seems that Google is making good on yet another early promise and Stadia is being tested across a few non-Pixel phones.
First reported by 9to5 Google, it seems quite a few users across quite a few different phones are seeing the option to spin up a gaming session right on their phone versus the closest Chromecast available. For Pixel users, this has been there since the get-go. For the majority of Stadia players, however, playing on a non-Pixel phone hasn’t even been an option. Google did promise back in November that the aim is to support all devices eventually, so it is good to see Google already making moves in that direction.
Apparently, users getting the option to begin gameplay on their non-Pixel phones are only getting a single session in before the ability to play on their device goes away. When working, however, users of the OnePlus 6T, Samsung Galaxy S10e, and Galaxy Note 9 have all been able to play at least one session successfully while on WIFI and having the Stadia (or other 3rd party controller) attached via USB cable.
Likely this is some sort of A/B testing on the server side of Stadia that is giving Google some statistics about how Stadia is performing on non-Pixel phones. I’d imagine more and more of these reports will surface over the next few weeks and we’ll see an official announcement of new supported phones before the February launch of Stadia Base. As the game library continues to build and players continue seeing more options for the ways they would like to play, it feels like Stadia is still moving forward with great momentum. Here’s hoping most things are in place by the time Stadia Base is pushed out the door.
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