Google Stadia allows you to hop into other players’ screenshots and start playing

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Google Stadia has been in the news a lot recently, and not always for the best reasons. Most recently, we covered Journey to the Savage Planet, a first-party Stadia game that launched with a lot of bugs, but no one could fix them because Google had recently shut down the studio that made the game. However, in this case, we’re talking about a feature that looks really cool.

Much like other platforms, Stadia allows users to share screenshots of their gameplay with their friends. Where Stadia differs, however, is that users can share a game’s “state” with their friends, using a feature called State Share. Their friends can then hop in and play the level shown in the screenshot, from the beginning of the level. Since Stadia is all cloud-based, all of a game’s data is saved online, and users are able to share all of that data with others, as long as they own the particular game.

Essentially what happens is that when users save their game, there is a URL that is created of that moment in the game. Users can then share that URL with others as long as they own the game and those people can play the featured level.

This is where Stadia can shine

This feature makes Stadia seem like the futuristic gaming platform that most of us expected. According to PCGamer, this feature really shines in the action-RPG, PixelJunk Raiders, which was recently released as a Stadia exclusive. Though the game does seem to have a few issues, the procedural map generation can lead to some cool sharing opportunities. If you find a level that you think is cool, you can share it with your friends to let them experience it first hand.

Stadia has hit a few speed bumps since its late 2019 release. There’s still a long way to go to make game streaming a staple in the gaming world but features like this show the possibilities. Hopefully, we will see more cool things like this coming from game streaming in the future.

UPDATE 3/16/2021 12:06 PM ET: We’ve updated the text to better reflect how Google Stadia’s State Share feature works.

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