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.
Stadia, Google’s 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 “obvious” 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’s library. As Stadia’s marketplace of games and expansions has steadily grown, the task of hunting down the exact game or add-on you’re looking for has grown more frustrating. Even searching for your own games can become frustrating as your library expands. Stadia’s Google Assistant integration helps with this, but unfortunately it’s only available for the Chromecast Ultra. Beyond “new” features, Stadia also desperately needs to bring its various apps in line with each other. The Android app doesn’t offer party or voice chat capabilities, nothing but Chromecast Ultra offers the Google Assistant, the web app can’t be used to set up a Stadia Controller for the first time, and more. Another critical goal for Stadia’s 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.
