Back when YouTube Gaming was announced, there was one feature of the app which was missing that is currently available on the web version of the service, and that’s live streaming games. While this is coming to the mobile app soon enough as Google has now confirmed it, it hasn’t shown up just yet and it could still be a few weeks before the capability is turned on. With the latest update to the Play Games app it would seem Google is laying some groundwork for that feature to be added for YouTube gaming along with another capability allowing users to record their screen natively without having to install any other applications to complete this task.
This most recent update is for Play Games version 3.3 and some users may already have it installed on their device as the update should have began hitting devices last week, but if you still don’t have the latest version and you’d like to install it you can grab the apk file here. Based on strings of code found in the apk of the latest version of Play Games, it’s possible that Google’s plans are to give the power of enabling the live streaming and screen recording functionality to Play Games as opposed to YouTube Gaming itself, so although these features will likely interact with the YouTube Gaming app in the near future, Play Games may actually be the place where users go to initiate either process.
Other details reveal that live streaming and screen recording may only have options for 480p and 720p when the features go live, but 1080p could be introduced later on. There’s no mention of when exactly Google might bring in 1080p video for the mobile version of the service, but it would be unlikely for them to leave it out completely. Of course, when these functions go live, users can expect to see some new icons representing the interaction for the new features, like floating action buttons for starting a recording, stopping a recording, as well as FAB icons for enabling and disabling both the mic, and camera. Users can also likely expect status icons to show up denoting each action of whether the camera is on or off, the mic is on or off, etc.
