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Direct Touch brought the ability to directly touch your device’s screen to affect gameplay in Stadia earlier this year to Android. Today on the Stadia Community Blog, Google announced that this feature is now available on iOS via the Stadia web application.
Direct touch allows players to control the game by tapping, sliding, and pinching the screen. Try it now in HUMANKIND where you can create your own civilization using just your fingers.
Stadia Community Blog
For those unaware, iOS users will have to visit Stadia on the web via their browser and then create a shortcut using the menu settings. This will place Stadia on your home screen for quick access and it will be presented to you as an app. The only difference here is that it’s now an app powered by web technology instead of being packaged and locally downloaded!
The reason for this update is that the company promised to bring HUMANKIND (a game that competes most directly with Sid Meier’s Civilization VI) with its touch-compatible gameplay to Apple’s ecosystem. Making good on that promise, access to Direct Touch is already rolled out – no waiting necessary.
While this feature will be compatible with other titles in the future, it’s currently only working or rather necessary with HUMANKIND because of the developer’s implementation. When more creators choose to bake touch into their works, you’ll be able to experience it at launch across all platforms now with no compromise!
I still think Google should start porting Google Play and Play Pass games over to Stadia since that makes a bunch of sense to me. There are thousands of titles that gamers would benefit from being able to play without clogging up the storage space on their phones or Chromebooks, and if the company isn’t already planning this behind the scenes, they’re missing an opportunity to push mobile gaming into the future.
Sure, we’d always need the ability to download games for various reasons, but music, movies, books, and every other form of entertainment is now able to be streamed, so to me, it makes sense that games – beyond AAA-quality ones – should follow suit.
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