Last night we were lucky enough to try the latest feature that Stadia are rolling out for their cloud gaming platform, Crowd Play and it was a slick glimpse of what’s possible with cloud gaming.
Crowd Play lets you join game streamers live on YouTube and play head to head against them! It’s really well integrated in to the YouTube experience and thanks to YouTube game streamer Juganawt, we were able to join in the gaming fun on a live stream last night. The whole Crowd Play experience was amazing and everything felt slick, smooth and most of all, extremely enjoyable!
Google and the Stadia team deserve huge credit for this and although it was touted at GDC 2019, they’ve clearly been working hard behind the scenes to make everything as friction-less as possible. Last night Juganawt was live streaming Mortal Kombat 11: Aftermath on Stadia and below the chat, there was a button to join the queue of other people watching and waiting for their turn to play MK11 against Juganawt. Once you click the join button, it changes to inform you of your place in the queue and once it’s your turn, you have 1 minute to accept the challenge and join the stream live!
Once you’ve accepted the challenge, a Stadia tab automatically pops up and boots you straight in to the game, no logos etc, just straight in to your match with the streamer. I know I’ve said it already, but I can’t emphasise enough just how silky smooth the whole experience was!
Stadia appear to be testing Crowd Play with a limited number of pre-selected streamers but if our experience last night was anything to go by, this is ready for prime time. The deep, seemless integration is something that is only possible thanks to Google owning both Stadia & YouTube.
Thanks again to Juganawt for the opportunity to join in the fun on stream. If you’re in to gaming and haven’t subscribed to him already, he’s a great guy and extremely knowledgeable in gaming from old school classics, right the way through to modern systems and cloud gaming. Check out his YouTube channel for yourself or watch the full Crowd Play live stream below.
