Google Stadia has received a huge update allowing players to stream their gameplay to YouTube plus a few other perks.
Thie feature was announced when the service launched over a year ago, but has been delayed until now. This is one of the platform’s most interesting features since it allows players to join each other’s games via a live stream and more.
The update appears to be rolling out, and if you have it, the option should be hidden in the ‘Friends’ section in the Stadia menu. I don’t have the update yet, but it says the feature is coming soon to me.
Once you start a live stream on Stadia, you’re given a few options. First, you need to give it a title and an age-gate if necessary. Then you can choose whether or not to show a view counter and enable Stadia’s ‘Crowd Play’ and ‘Crowd Choice’ features.
Crowd Play allows the streamer to invite some watchers to join the stream to play with them. There are a few rules with this, which means you need to have a Stadia account and the game the streamer is playing to participate. You can find out more on Google’s support page. Crowd Choice is similar, but it only allows viewers to vote in the stream chat for what the player does. Of these two features, Crowd Play seems like the more fun option, but in games with branching dialogue trees like Fallout or Cyberpunk 2077, Crowd Choice might be fun too.
Once you start streaming, you have a few audio options to select. This selects if the viewers hear just the game, or the game and your voice or your game-parties’ chat. The oddest option is that streamers need to watch the chat from a companion device like their phone or another computer if they want to interact with their viewers.
Overall I think this feature could become more popular as more and more people try it. Over the weekend, Google was testing out this feature with popular gamers on YouTube. They were streaming Super Bomberman R and another game called Outcasters, with viewers joining into the matches to play with the streamer. I’m not a huge fan of watching streams, but if I was, I’m sure the opportunity to play some games with someone who I follow online would be a ton of fun.
Source: 9to5Google
