Google Stadia finally gets Crowd Choice
Your call.
Google Stadia finally gets the Crowd Choice feature this week.
Crowd Choice, a kind of choose your own adventure system for those watching streamers play Stadia games on YouTube, goes live alongside the release of Dead by Daylight on 1st October 2020.
It'll also be available with Baldur's Gate 3 when Larian's hotly-anticipated role-playing game launches on Google's streaming service on 6th October.
Here's how it works: when the YouTuber enables Crowd Choice, the Stadia audience can vote. The streamer gets the results in percentages and can choose to follow the players or go their own way.
In Dead By Daylight, viewers can decide whether the YouTuber is the "killer" or the "survivor", followed by which character they become.
As for Baldur's Gate 3, all narrative choices can be used by streamers to poll their viewers to decide what happens next.
It's simply to enable if you're streaming a Stadia game on YouTube. Go to manage stream, turn Crowd Choice on or off, then click update stream.
Stadia has been slowly getting some of the more eye-catching features first revealed when the tech was unveiled at the Game Developers Conference in early 2019. Crowd Choice arrives 10 months after Stadia launched, and alongside six more Stadia Pro games. (Stadia Pro is the paid for subscription that includes a library of games - although you still have to pay for new games on top.)
New for Pro are the aforementioned Dead by Daylight, and Human: Fall Flat, Superhot: Mind Control Delete, Lara Croft: Temple of Osiris, Celeste, and Jotun. There are now 29 games in the Stadia Pro library.
Things are hotting up in the world of video game streaming, with Microsoft's cloud gaming effort now a part of the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, and Amazon's Luna now fully unveiled. Google, though, has repeatedly suffered criticism for asking customers to buy games on top of the Pro subscription.