Stadia

Stadia widely rolling out redesigned web app w/ new UI [U]

Ben Schoon | Dec 14 2020 - 11:49 am PT

Over the past several weeks, Google has been rolling out update after update for Stadia, and now, it looks like the company is preparing a UI revamp. Some users are seeing a new web UI for Stadia that includes a bunch of welcome improvements.

Update 12/14: The new Stadia web app UI is now rolling out widely to what appears to be all users. It seems that the update is also bringing support for Ubisoft+ which was officially announced earlier this morning. The original article follows.

A Redditor first spotted a brand new UI for the Stadia web app on his account through the Chrome browser. The updated UI, seen in action in a video below (via StadiaSource), brings some great enhancements to the Library portion of the platform.

The updated interface shows your most recently played game first, with three new boxes appearing off to the site. The first of those is for “Pro Games,” with the second being for “Stadia News,” that one linking over to community.stadia.com. Finally, there’s a “New Releases” section. The first and last of these new boxes are just shortcuts to those portions of the Stadia Store.

Perhaps more important, though, is the change to game pages. When you tap on a game from the Library tab, it now brings up a larger menu. From there, you can access family controls for a game, something that was previously limited to the game’s store listing. The game page also shows categories for each game and a shortcut to the store page (presumably for add-on content).

Rounding out this UI update, Google is also now showing three games in each row, a better use of space on the larger laptop and desktop screens. Notably, the users who have seen this new Stadia web UI are not seeing any updates on the mobile or Chromecast apps.

Update 12/7: It appears that this new UI is rolling out a bit more widely this afternoon after showing up for a couple of users last week. Our own Abner Li had the redesign show up on his account, giving us the chance to look at it a bit more deeply.

As shown in the previous screenshot and video above, the grid has been expanded to show three rows of games with the top section also showing new shortcuts and buttons. We also found that, at the bottom of the home page, there’s a “Pro games to claim” section which allows users to quickly claim any new additions to the Stadia Pro lineup with just a single click. In our case, too, the interface for actually launching a game was also slightly tweaked from what’s seen in the video above.

Google also quietly refreshed the icon for the Stadia Progressive Web App, giving it a red gradient background and a white logo. It’s a huge improvement, especially on Chrome OS (pictured below).

Also of note, one user on the Stadia subreddit saw a search bar show up in the web app only in the store, but the post has since been deleted, so we’re not sure what’s up with that.