Stadia

You can now message your friends on Google Stadia [Updated]

Ben Schoon | Nov 16 2020 - 1:25 pm PT

As its one-year anniversary quickly approaches, Google has been on a tear with new features for Stadia. We’ve been tracking it for months, and now it appears that messaging is rolling out on Google Stadia.

While it’s easy to joke that Stadia is now “another Google messaging app,” the fact remains that messaging and voice chat are core parts of any gaming platform, and there’s no reason for Stadia to be any different.

Update 11/16: After rolling out to some users last week, Stadia messaging is now widely rolling out across the globe. Mario, a product manager at Google, confirmed on Twitter that the feature is available in every country Stadia supports — US, Germany, Canada, Finland, Denmark, France, Sweden, Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Ireland, the UK, and Spain.

The feature should appear on the web app the next time you load it up. On the Android app, it should go live soon but may require a force stop.

First spotted by @ipnagogico on Twitter, it appears that messaging is rolling out now on Stadia. We can’t confirm the same on our own accounts, but this use shows a pop-up regarding the new feature in the web app. A rough translation from Italian to English 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.

Behind that pop-up, we can further see that messaging appears as a tab on the Stadia friend list. It’s still unclear exactly what the feature will look like on the Android and iOS apps, as well as if we’ll be able to use it on Chromecast, but this is certainly a step in the right direction!

Let us know in the comments if you’re also seeing messaging on Stadia. Given the speed of the family sharing rollout last week, this new one for messaging should bring the feature to most users over the next few days.