Google will bring Stadia to 19 new phones, including models from Samsung and Razer

Google is bringing its Stadia cloud gaming service to 18 new phones, including the Samsung Galaxy S20 series.

Starting on 20 February, Stadia will arrive on 14 Samsung phones, in addition to the ASUS ROG Phone and Phone II and both versions of the Razer Phone.

Stadia was exclusive to Google's Pixel phones when it first launched, but Google is finally expanding access to more mobile devices, which will be key to helping it realise its vision for cloud gaming.

Cloud gaming is still very much in its infancy, and Stadia will face a lot of competition from upcoming services like Microsoft's xCloud and the just-launched GeForce Now.

Its roll out has been dogged by many issues, and players have complained that they're still waiting for a host of promised features, such as 4K support, Google Assistant and wireless controller functionality in browser mode, and even just more games.

Google has seemingly attempted to pass the ball back to publishers, saying that it's up to them to announce their games. That's partly true, since developers need to do more work to get their games on Stadia, which runs on Linux servers.

But the company still has a long road ahead of it to truly deliver on cloud gaming, including ironing out various performance issues.

The announcement of the support for new phones is a step in the right direction, and players will be able to pair the devices with wireless gamepads over Bluetooth.

The one exception is the Stadia controller, which will need to be plugged in. For a full list of compatible devices, you can head here.

In January, Google also promised that more than 120 games would be arriving on Stadia in 2020, including 10 exclusives in the first half of the year.

This article was first published in Hardware Zone.