Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR Google killed off Stadia nearly three years ago, but released a Bluetooth upgrade for Stadia controllers.
After pushing back its deadline for installing the Bluetooth firmware twice, today is looking like the last official day you’ll be able to use Google’s flashing tool.
Even after Google takes its tool offline, third-party efforts have preserved the Bluetooth firmware and allow you to host the flashing tool yourself.
Cloud-based gaming is bigger than ever right now, whether you’re using services like Xbox Game Pass or just streaming games on your Switch. But despite this clearly being a viable business model, Google just couldn’t figure out how to make it work, and now we’re quickly coming up on the three-year anniversary of the company shutting down Stadia. While that was a very public failure for Google, the company still tried to make the best of the situation by giving Stadia hardware a new lease on life — and if you haven’t taken advantage of that yet, there’s an important deadline we’re running up against.
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When you’re gaming in the cloud, minimizing latency is king, and in order to process your inputs as quickly as possible, the Stadia controller didn’t connect to your phone or your PC directly, and instead used Wi-Fi to communicate with Google’s servers. With those servers no longer active, Google developed a new firmware owners can install that enables Bluetooth support. Once flashed, you can start using the pad like any other wireless Bluetooth controller.
That was a fantastic development, but it arrived with an odd restriction: There was a ticking clock on this offer. Google initially told gamers that they only had until the end of 2023 to update their controllers, after which the web-based Stadia controller flashing tool would no longer be available.
So far, though, Google has never really gotten around to enforcing that deadline. First it pushed things back to the end of 2024. And then it pushed them back again to the end of this year.
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