Video and music tend to hog the headlines around the subject of casting technology, but with its new Chromecast, Google is making a play in another area: games.

Gaming, once dominated by specialist companies, is increasingly becoming a battleground for the tech giants.

Google’s rival Apple recently focused on games as a key selling point of its updated Apple TV. That device can download and run games, spurring talk of it competing with established games consoles such as Sony’s PlayStation 4, Microsoft’s Xbox One and Nintendo’s Wii U.

Now Google’s making playing games on smartphones but viewing them on TV’s a feature of its Chromecast, using your phone both as a controller and for its processing power.

Google’s vice president of Chromecast, Mario Queiroz, argues this gives it a key advantage over the likes of Apple TV.

“There’s a fundamental difference between the other models out there and what we’re doing. Games require computing power, and the smartphone has superior computing power to any of the popular streaming boxes that are out there. It may be one or two generations more computing power,” he told the Guardian.

“By running the game on the smartphone, you’re taking advantage of much more powerful computing power than you are by downloading a game on to a streaming box and running it on that device,” he said.

“Our model gives us a huge advantage in being able to run games and render much higher quality graphics. And we are seeing a lot of takeup by game developers of our APIs, including those that allow them to build multiplayer games. Something we think will be very popular with the Cast model.”

Google launched the first Chromecast in July 2013 as a thumb-sized device that plugged into a television. By May 2015, the company had sold 17m of them, and accumulated a library of thousands of Android and iOS apps supporting its “cast” technology.

It is hoping to build on this with the second-generation Chromecast, as well as with the Chromecast Audio, which will connect to speakers and hi-fis to enable them to play music from partner services, from the company’s own Google Play Music to partners like Pandora and, a new addition, Spotify.

It’s far from the first gadget to do this, from the connected hi-fis of Sonos and other manufacturers to cheaper devices like the Gramofon, which also has a close relationship with Spotify, and which looks like the most direct rival for Chromecast Audio.

Queiroz hopes that the latter device’s price at $35 will help connected audio in the home break out of being a technology for music and/or tech geeks, without requiring people to replace their hi-fis. “Fewer than 5% of US households have speakers that can connect to Wi-Fi,” he said.

Can Google reach a decent number of the remaining 95%, and take this technology mainstream? “I think we will. That’s our objective. The pieces of this that are new – that can bring it mainstream – are firstly the apps that people already use to listen to music on their smartphones,” he said.

“Second, they already have speakers and wifi in their homes. And now for $35, you are bringing all of that together.”

Chromecast Audio expands Google’s Cast technology to speakers.

Gustav Soderstrom, vice president of product at Spotify, suggested that devices like the Chromecast family can also bring bigger tech-industry concepts to a more mainstream audience.

“If you think about last year’s big focus on the internet of things, people kept talking about connected fire alarms and similar devices. But the obvious thing is to get your music playing with those connected features. That’s the most natural entry point to the internet of things,” he said.

“This $35 device may be the thing that takes it from ‘I’m a fan of the internet of things’ – which unfortunately not a lot of people are – to ‘I want music in my home’ which is a real use case. Most people don’t care if their thermostat talks to their fire extinguisher, even if I care about that quite a bit, because I’m a geek!”

Soderstrom added that Spotify is excited about the amount of experimentation going on around music in the home, and not just for hardware.

“There is a lot of experimentation about what the perfect interface is: is it a piece of glass, is it your voice, is it dedicated hardware? Amazon is experimenting with voice-only with its Echo, for example,” he said. “You see different companies taking different approaches.”

The software and services running on these products are interesting because, in many cases, they will be interfacing with multiple people rather than a single owner. Google’s Queiroz said his company is looking to app developers to think about collaborative use cases.

“For multiplayer games, your smartphone is your controller,” he said, before citing an API launched by Google this year that will enable developers to add “joint queues” for their cast-enabled apps.

“It’s something we’ve had from the very first day we launched YouTube for Chromecast: you can create playlists that everybody can contribute to: they go into the YouTube app and add to a joint queue across multiple people,” he said.

Spotify, too, is thinking about the communal experience, and how to best fit it into the company’s mobile app, which is becoming ever more personalised to the individual owner of the smartphone it’s installed on.

It will provide a design challenge for Spotify, but Soderstrom said the company is keen for its mobile app to rise to the task of understanding when a user is playing music at home – whether through a PlayStation 4, a Sonos hi-fi or a speaker with a Chromecast Audio attached – and adapting accordingly.

“When you come home, with Connect, your speakers pop up and become available, so it understands your context in that sense, and that applies whether you’re on the train, in the home, in the car,” said Soderstrom. “It should be able to adapt to the situation you’re in.”

• Sonos keen to support Apple Music alongside Spotify

