Stadia begins rolling out its long-awaited messaging feature

The closer we get to Stadia’s first birthday, the more they seem to be layering the icing on their cake. Having recently breached a hundred games on their store, given away free Stadia Premiere Edition bundles, launched Family game sharing, and added several other new features to the service, they’re now rolling out their long-awaited text-based messaging feature.

First spotted by a Twitter user named @ipnagogico, the pop-up introducing the feature reads: “We’ve added messaging functionality to Stadia. You can now quickly chat with your friends and other players to talk about your next game session and continue to have fun on all your screens.”

To the right of the pop-up, you can see that the user’s messages will be housed under their profile menu on a tab next to the ‘Amici’ or friend’s list. I imagine that groups you create will have the ability to create a text-based message thread, but there’s been no mention of this yet. The best place to drop messages into the Android and iOS apps would be on the bottom navigation. On Chromecast, it would make the most sense for Google to allow sending messages primarily with the Assistant button on the controller by voice for speed, but we’ll have to wait to see. If you don’t yet see the messages feature, just keep refreshing. It may also take a good few days or more to roll out because, well, that’s how Google does things. We’ll keep this article up to date if there are any further developments. Happy gaming!

Source: Thanks @Gemstadia!