Your friendly reminder to update your Stadia Controller

Post 00054 | November 24th 2024

Want to see something funny?

Yes indeed, it’s the last remnants of Google’s cloud streaming flop. Touted as a “Netflix for Games”, Stadia allowed you to play video games over the Internet, but instead of having a console, the games would be played in Google’s datacentres and streamed to the player. It would work with your existing Google devices and browsers, meaning you could start your game on your Android-powered TV or Chromecast and continue playing later on the train using your Android phone. It a way, it’s actually quite remarkable that flopped so bad it did. Launching in November 2019, it practically along with COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdowns, you know you’re dealing with a dud when you can’t even sell your online entertainment service to a planet that wasn’t allowed to leave their homes. Heck, there was a chip shortage at the time! Even if the stores were open, they weren’t able to keep systems in stock!

So why did it fail so badly? I think the main reason was the “Netflix for Games” people had started calling it before the announcement. While a Netflix subscription offers you a buffet of video, with Stadia, you subscribe to rent your spot in the datacentre. You are still expected to pay full price for your games. To add insult to injury, you could only play your purchased games on Stadia. Now you had the worst of both worlds. Netflix often removes content due to licensing; You can probably imagine the annoyance of a show being pulled while you’re nearing the series finale. Also, with Stadia being run by Google, a company infamous for killing their services prematurely, why would anyone invest in a games collection that might at any point disappear into thin air? In fact, this is exactly what happened in 2023. After months of silence, other than news about shut down game studios, Google finally pulled the plug on the project in 2023.

Admittedly, Google handled the shutdown quite honourably. Handware and software sales were refunded and after some brief backlash, they released a tool to turn your Stadia controller into a bluetooth controller. This tool will only be online for the rest of the year, meaning you only have until New Year’s Eve to convert your controllers. Looking at eBay, they are priced fairly sensibly - About the price you’d expect to pay for a third party controller. I picked mine up a little while after the tool was released - I think I paid a little more. In any case, it is a perfectly decent controller, so if you find one for a good price it might be worth picking up, if for no other reason than it being a flop, and flops are always funny.

Update 25th november:

It looks like there is an alternative for people who miss the deadline. Hacking supremo GaryOderNichts has been tinkering with his Stadia controller and released a blog post about his findings as well as a tool for flashing the controller firmware on his Github. It definitely looks a lot more techy than the official solution, but it should still after the deadline (He is linking to, but not hosting the firmware files; However, it looks like they have been archived on the WaybackMachine). Thanks to Lossrain for headsup! (Entry # 8 in the Guestbook)