Google to create a mountain of e-waste weighing 75 tons, or a Stadia controller firmware update
Update: The Stadia Bluetooth Controller update has released
With Stadia shutting down there’s a whole lot of controllers that are suddenly facing obsolescence because they’re locked into Google Stadia’s little niche. Basically if you have one, it’s a Bluetooth controller that refuses to work with anything else because that would have been too cool. An incentive to make you stick with Stadia, which was a thing. Sort of incentivized people to not just sign up for a free trial with controller and then just use the controller for other services.
Don’t throw away your Stadia controller. The controllers currently will still work while plugged in (with one or two workarounds,) and Stadia isn’t going away for a couple of months, and if things are to be believed a potential firmware update is being looked at that would enable you to update the controller and use it as a Bluetooth device.
Google is aware that their controller was good, and people want to use it. Whether any money whatsoever will be invested in the project, or the source code to the Stadia controller released so that developers can post their own custom Bluetooth enabled firmware, remains to be seen.
The fixes being looked at are a firmware update, and a bootloader unlock. The second would allow custom ROMs and development. The former would just make it work before shuffling off that mortal coil.
I’m really hoping they open this up.
As for the 75 tons, probably not but I took an estimated quarter million controllers as that was the only number of Stadia customers I could locate any mention of back in July 2022 and assumed they all had a 9.44 ounce controller.
Anyway, let’s hope Google does the right thing here and makes these things usable beyond Stadia.
