Google Stadia: Everything you need to know

With Google’s focus for Stadia shifting primarily to third-party games, developers such as Ubisoft take on a much more important role for the platform’s future. Today, during its “Forward” event, Ubisoft showed its commitment to Stadia, announcing new games, including Rainbow Six Extraction, a new Avatar title, and more coming to Google’s streaming platform.

It’s been far from a quiet week for Google Stadia with big announcements from Google itself, but on the game front, the lead up to E3 has left a bit of a drought. In some good/bad news, depending on how you look at it, the Stadia exclusive Orcs Must Die 3 is heavily teasing at a debut on other platforms, probably Steam.

Part of the dream of cloud gaming is the ability to stream games on the go. However, the bandwidth requirements of these services and the data caps from carriers provide a barrier. To help with that, Google has just added a new “mobile data optimized” streaming quality setting to Stadia that streams in 720p but cuts data usage by nearly half.

In support of Stadia, AT&T is offering a six-month Stadia Pro for free to select customers and looking to improve their networks.

On June 23, full support for Stadia is coming to the Chromecast with Google TV, along with a handful of other Android TV devices.

The latest update to the Stadia app for Android includes work toward filters for the store, the ability to voice chat with friends, the much-anticipated Google TV app, and more.

One of the next major releases coming to Stadia is Far Cry 6, and ahead of launch, pre-orders for the game have gone live. Also new this week, updates for a few titles on Google’s service, the arrival of crossplay in Bomberman, and more.

Stadia has launched a new referral promotion offering additional bonuses such as an exclusive avatar and a discounted Stadia Controller for referring friends — in addition to the normal rewards.

For June 2021, Google is adding four games to Stadia Pro in a continuation from last month. The first three titles have already launched, but Blue Fire will debut with the subscription.

Stadia players have been at a loss for new games recently as a second week has gone by with none surfacing, but there are a lot coming up. This weekend, though, Stadia players can enjoy Ghost Recon: Breakpoint for free as well as enjoying updates to a handful of titles.

At the end of 2019, Google Duo and WebRTC creator Justin Uberti became a high-ranking engineer for Stadia. The Google Distinguished Engineer announced today that he was joining Clubhouse, the audio social media app.

As a part of its “Good Stuff” event last year, Google announced that the hit Ark: Survival Evolved would be making its way to Stadia in “early 2021.” That timeline has, obviously, come and gone, but today, the studio behind Ark has clarified what’s going on. Ark: Survival Evolved is getting a release date on Stadia at some point “this summer.”