The best thing to come out of Google Stadia will live on after the service dies

While gaming service Stadia is shutting down on January 18, Google has announced plans to keep its controller alive. It may not seem like much in the face of an entire catalog of cloud-streaming games becoming inaccessible, but the controller really was the silent pinnacle of Google’s first big move into gaming.

While it hasn’t yet revealed full details, Google said on Twitter it will “release a self-service tool to enable Bluetooth connections on your Stadia controller.” Google has promised to share the details in time for the shutdown.

Currently, the Stadia gamepad can only connect to Google’s platform. Until these recently announced plans, when service ends on Jan. 18, the controller would have become a useless hunk of plastic, nickel, and silicon destined for landfill. Now it looks like you can use the controller with other Bluetooth devices – probably PC and Android; maybe Apple devices and even the PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch.

The beginning of the end

In a post (opens in new tab)Last September, Stadia’s general manager Phil Harrison announced that: “While Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers has been based on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users we expected, so we’ve made the difficult decision to start phasing out our Stadia streaming service.”

The news came out of the blue, not because Stadia had been a resounding success, but because Google seemed to have the cash to get through its floundering childhood. Perhaps Google could have made Stadia a success through sheer stubbornness, as Epic has done with the Epic Games Store. Instead, despite competition from the likes of Microsoft Xbox Cloud Gaming and Nvidia GeForce Now, Google chose to close shop.

Harrison also confirmed in the post that Google will refund “all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store.”

Other good news for players was that games like Orcs Must Die 3, which originally launched as a Google Stadia exclusive, had ventured onto other platforms, so we wouldn’t lose access to everything Stadia brought.

The best of a bad situation

While it was good news that Google wouldn’t let Stadia’s early adopters out of pocket, buyers would be stuck with perfectly good hardware that wouldn’t be usable anymore. As our own Rhys Wood put it at the time: “Google has clearly put a lot of resources into researching and developing a controller for Stadia. It’s all effort that may now, alas, be wasted.

“At a glance, the Google Stadia controller doesn’t look anything special. It has a similar silhouette to the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, or a slightly slimmer Xbox 360 pad. But in my hands, the Stadia controller just feels… right.

“It’s a wonderfully comfortable controller to hold. The buttons and sticks are high quality to the touch. And I love the robust collection of shortcuts in the center of the pad that make it easy to take screenshots, access Google Assistant for voice-guided navigation, and more.”

It is therefore excellent news that the controller will get a second life. However, I doubt that Google will supplement the gamepad simply to sell it as a third-party controller. The device becomes a strange ergonomic holdover from the perils of launching a cloud gaming service in competition with Microsoft and Sony.

In thin air

Google Stadia’s slight rise and rapid decline is a stark reminder that we have less control over the games we buy as the video game market shifts to digital-first. It’s great that Google was able to pay back everything it earned through Stadia’s early adopters, but it wasn’t obligated to make amends.

Google could have simply shut down the servers and walked away, not doing the work to make its controller usable by other services, or not working with developers to let players transfer their game save files from Stadia to Steam – as it has done with Borderlands 3 from Gearbox.

Steam, the Xbox Marketplace, PlayStation Store, Nintendo’s eShop and Epic Games Store all seem too big to shut down, but there’s no guarantee that those digital store owners won’t one day run into financial trouble and shut down the servers. On that day, you could lose access to every game you’ve purchased over the years without the security of owning a physical copy of a game. Although, admittedly, since games rely more on online features, even a physical disc is no guarantee of long-term ownership of a game.

Well, this good news about the Stadia controller has really led me down a dark and bleak path. What can I say other than hug your loved ones and back up your saved files?