Here’s a look ahead at what we believe are some of the biggest areas that Google Stadia should focus on for their 2021 road map.<\/b>
\nStadia, Google\u2019s still-teething game streaming service, is now over a year old, but it still has many needs and significant room to grow. Here are some of the biggest areas that we see Stadia focusing on for their 2021 road map. Over the course of 2020, Stadia has steadily caught up with many of the expectations that Google laid out for it at launch. However, there are quite a few \u201cobvious\u201d things that are still tragically missing from Stadia. The most egregious of these is the lack of any search functionality, both in the Stadia Store and within a player\u2019s library. As Stadia\u2019s marketplace of games and expansions has steadily grown, the task of hunting down the exact game or add-on you\u2019re looking for has grown more frustrating. Even searching for your own games can become frustrating as your library expands. Stadia\u2019s Google Assistant integration helps with this, but unfortunately it\u2019s only available for the Chromecast Ultra. Beyond \u201cnew\u201d features, Stadia also desperately needs to bring its various apps in line with each other. The Android app doesn\u2019t offer party or voice chat capabilities, nothing but Chromecast Ultra offers the Google Assistant, the web app can\u2019t be used to set up a Stadia Controller for the first time, and more. Another critical goal for Stadia\u2019s road map in 2021 is to expand the playerbase. Over the last few months, Google has put a great deal of effort into making more people aware of the Stadia name, particularly with the recent YouTube Premium giveaway. Then, with the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, Stadia proved it was more than capable of running the latest releases. Over the next year, Google needs to continue its outreach efforts to ensure that as more games arrive on Stadia, the older games will still have enough players to sustain a community. One path to expanding the playerbase is to bring Stadia to more countries around the world. By formally expanding into countries like India, Mexico, and Brazil \u2014 of which, the latter two have already gotten a taste of cloud gaming through Microsoft\u2019s xCloud Streaming Beta \u2014 Stadia could see an explosion of new players almost overnight. Of course, one of the most surefire ways of expanding the number of people playing games on Stadia is to actually offer the kinds of games that people are looking to play. Google has already made some progress on this by managing to offer entirely free-to-play games like Destiny 2 and Super Bomberman R Online. No doubt games like Fortnite and Apex Legends would bring a massive opportunity for Stadia to gain more players. A much trickier strategy for Stadia to get more players is to offer the latest \u201cviral\u201d games \u2014 think along the lines of Fall Guys and Hades, some of the bigger overnight successes of the year. There\u2019s no denying that Stadia is one of the most convenient ways of playing a particular game, just buy and play. Unfortunately, there\u2019s almost no way to know in advance which game is going to be the next big thing. Overall, Google needs to put Stadia into position for success by ensuring 2021\u2019s road map is filled with games that have same-day launches on Stadia, instead of the months-delayed launches we saw in 2020. And that\u2019s a downright shame considering there\u2019s such an infinite wealth of possibilities to be tapped into. Imagine if a game could be directly tied into the Google Assistant. As suggested at GDC 2019, players could one day ask the Assistant for help with beating a level. But let\u2019s go deeper. A horror game could \u2014 theoretically, if given permission \u2014 use the Assistant to control your smart home lights to suddenly black out your room in a dramatic moment. Regardless of the actual implementation, more games should attempt to take advantage of Stadia\u2019s exclusive features in 2021, as it gives players a reason to play on Stadia over other consoles that they may already own. One of the more unlikely items for Stadia\u2019s 2021 road map is the possibility of a \u201chardware\u201d refresh. With the latest generation of consoles now in many households around the world, Stadia\u2019s seemingly last-gen performance will not age well, particularly as games arrive that optimize for those new consoles. For quite some time now, it\u2019s been rumored that something of a \u201cGen 2\u201d is coming to Stadia, bringing features that we\u2019ve not yet seen. For example, the developers of the upcoming game Chorus have indicated \u2014 but later deleted \u2014 that the Stadia version of the game will offer ray tracing, a computationally difficult lighting technique not used by any current Stadia games. It remains to be seen what all else such a \u201cGen 2\u201d upgrade could bring, but the important thing to remember is that the \u201cupgrade\u201d would be seamless and shouldn\u2019t cost players or even need you to think about it. Since everything is in the cloud, Stadia can simply boot more demanding games on better server hardware. I\u2019m mentioning this one last as it\u2019s the one thing that\u2019s been outright confirmed. Though the Chromecast with Google TV has been launched as an effective successor to the Chromecast Ultra, the newer Google TV\/Android TV powered device is currently unable to (officially) play games on Stadia. Thankfully, Google confirmed to us that Stadia would be coming to the Chromecast with Google TV in the first half of the new year, with broader Android TV support coming later on. In the meantime, our APK Insight team is closely following the development of Stadia\u2019s fledgling Android TV experience with each update to Stadia\u2019s Android app. Check out 9to5Google on YouTube for more news:<\/p>\n