Stadia Bluetooth Mode
stadia.google.com
stadia.google.com
A cookie for whoever's the first to snarf the firmware in-flight and whip up a standalone updater.
I can't think of much else they could have done to make things smoother for customers, short of not shutting it down at all of course. (And undoubtedly, the fact that they are killing yet another product is inescapable, and doesn't help their reputation for doing that.)
Link? I remember lots of people asking about this at launch and I don't remember there being a public statement from Google.
Like, look at the ongoing train-wreck that is the messaging (Gtalk/Hangouts/Chat/RCS/...) strategy.
It wasn't amazing though. GeForce NOW is so much better, at least for me. Higher resolution, more responsive, better selection of titles.
I'm an early adopter of cloud based GPUs. I've tried them all. Inn the last ~6 months GeForce NOW has finally made it so I can play AAA titles seamlessly. I can't tell the difference between local vs. cloud. Your experience may differ if you play competitive online games, but for single player games -- it's replaced any desire I have for a gaming PC.
I tried it yesterday and it crashed within 30 seconds after multiple issues and the image quality is far worse than Stadia, it also doesn't have all the nice features Stadia has.
I was using Geforce now when it was beta, but you can tell it's just streaming a PC, where as with Stadia everything was purpose built and worked great from Chrome.
Geforce now sucks compared to Stadia.
The tool is picky (in that "Flashback to ActiveX bullshit" kind of way) about the platform that does the update. Has to be a real computer (won't work from Android). Has to be running Chrome 108+ (My out-of-support chromebook with 106 or whatever won't work). Can't be a Linux box with Chromium or Chrome (always fails with "Close other tabs using the controller Couldn’t connect to your controller because it’s currently being used by another tab or program."). I eventually passed it through to a Windows 10 VM with google-brand Chrome and got it to work, and that exposed some extra details.
Instructions and responses:
Hold "..." during plug in
press "..." + Assistant (the other button with 3 dots below it) + A + Y all at once
Re-enumerates as "NXP Semiconductors SP Blank RT family"
[Server does something]
Re-enumerates as "Freescale Semiconductor USB Composite Device"
[Server does something]
Re-enumerates as "Google LLC Stadia Controller rev. A"
... it looks like it's temporarily nudging the NXP (formerly Freescale) MIMXRT1061 processor into some kind of DFU-like firmware update mode via the button combos, loading a different bitstream so it can act as a USB composite device to expose the update mechanism of the BCM43458 (radio), flashing that, then rebooting the main CPU back into the USB HID controller mode.
You do lose the headphone jack, which is a bit of a shame because having it work as a Bluetooth audio device would make it even more useful - but at least it's a Bluetooth controller.
The Bluetooth functionality is nice, though. I've gone through the process and for what it was (putting a controller into flash mode, then flashing a new bootloader(?), then flashing Bluetooth firmware) it was a very smooth process.
Especially for a browser-based process. I may not like the direction WebUSB is taking browsers, but the process was quite smooth and will work on pretty much any device with a USB port (except for platforms like iOS that limit browser availability).
I can't blame them; the value proposition for most gamers was approximately zero.
Question though: Did you get to keep your progress in the games, or did you lose that with the shutdown?
I did think about the money and Google angle up front. I saw no reason Google could get away with no refunds under Dutch law. That might have been optimistic, but in the end might also have driven them to refunds. Same risk is in my eBook or audiobook collection.
>Question though: Did you get to keep your progress in the games, or did you lose that with the shutdown?
You can get all your game savedata from Google Takeout, but in order to actually use it you'd need to own the game on another platform that lets you import that save data (like PC). The refund for each game is nice for re-buying the games elsewhere, but some consoles aren't that easy to import existing save data into. Some games implemented some cloud saves to help move data around, but there's probably some games where you're SOL getting your progress into your next platform.
Partly as the service had games like Monopoly and Uno on it, lots of casual party games, that is all it needed. Bad marketing from Google here, they should have pivoted to that market once they lost the toxic gaming community.
Counterexample: I was happily playing Destiny (a "twitchy" FPS) on an iPad in AirBnBs by Lake Tahoe or in Washington. I was really impressed.
In contrast, one of my friends who migrated to Geforce Now has been complaining about much worse latency, graphical and audio glitches. I assume Google's excellent ISP peering helped Stadia.
Another anecdote: I played through the entirety of Celeste (an extremely difficult frame-perfect platformer) on Stadia with almost no issues.
I switched to GeforceNow when Stadia announced they were shutting down. It's comparable in quality most of the time, but has quite a few quirks and the UX leaves a lot to be desired.
That really has no relation to the inherent problem of cloud gaming: latency. In fact, an Apple II can have better latency than a modern computer! [1]
And as a counterpoint to Celeste, they recently released their toy/testing game "The Worm Game" as a sort of parting gift, and I was shocked at the latency on that, where I had to really anticipate turning the snake. It was a completely different experience, and had I tried that first I never would've believed in the platform.
I have two dedicated gaming computers (one at a desk and one at a TV) and apparently still ended up putting in 828 hours of Stadia because it was just a nicer experience to have a single "gaming PC" with all of my games/saves that I could access from anywhere (even from either of my "real" gaming PCs!).
I disagree with the characterization of Destiny as twitchy. Maybe at higher skill tiers, but it feels Halo-y in that the combat is more methodical against larger targets. It feels controller-first design, which limits how precise and quick players need to be.
Anecdotal numbers: I have a Steam library of 197 games and 44 of them are available on GFN.
It wasn't DOA, it was killed by Google's poor marketing, strategy and reputation (which could have been compensated if they had done the first two right).
I blame their feeble marketing. For example I remain flabbergasted that the landing page for Stadia always redirected to a "Need Chrome" page if you weren't already on it, with zero enticement for why you should.
In theory, cloud-only gaming would make it possible for low budget gamers to experience high budget gaming. To play games they normally can't run because they can't afford the hardware. That should be the entire point of moving heavy compute to the cloud.
That theory doesn't work out because the network requirements to make this playable correlate with people that are NOT on a budget. Plus, you still have to pay full price for individual games, so in any case it's not low budget gaming.
Which brings into view the more likely target audience: the convenience gamer or "dad gamer". Gamers constrained by time but not money.
When you game infrequently yet consistently, a console is still the superior deal. They are heavily subsidized hardware, don't have the network overhead for rendering, a very long lifecycle (7 years), a huge selection of games, additional functionality (a media center for your TV), supports fully offline games, and are backed by actual gaming companies rather than the erratic toddler named Google.
Why would you possibly go for Stadia? To experiment? To not want to commit to owning a console? Fine, all valid. But you can't seriously think that's a sizable market. Simple market research or basic common sense should have revealed this prior to this disaster.
I'm especially calling it a disaster because during launch, Google got roasted with questions about the platform being future-proof, given their questionable reputation. They promised to commit this time, for real. Just 14 months later their internal game studio got shutdown, and things started rolling from there.
Zero market research and just throwing things at the wall, business as usual. Any other company being this unreliable would have been out of business long ago, but Google's arrogance knows no bounds as it prints money with ads.
They should not be celebrated for a graceful shutdown. They should be thought of as an unserious business to avoid. Don't ever put anything of value (time, money, energy, emotion) into a Google product.
To be fair, any product that allows them to capture data about your habits and improve their ability to push Ads at you is generally good (e.g., Google Account, Gmail, Android).
But I completely agree with you. They used OR instead of AND in their market research.
That's the thing with Google. They can get away with anything and keep failing upwards.
Meaning that controllers that have the old firmware will be unable to switch after that date? This seems like a weird restriction to have if this is a firmware update?
*I've heard from firmware engineers inside and outside of Google that licensing is the biggest reason why stuff isn't open sourced.
Unfortunately these companies control the drivers and have the strictest licenses imaginable, so even companies like Samsung or Google can only offer updates as long as their suppliers allow them, after that it's just waiting for the ABI to break and the old drivers to stop working
My platform of choice is now a Steam Deck so my first test will be there, hoping it'll work.
Anyone know if it's possible to buy one anywhere? I recall hearing that it was a decent controller.
Had to use Chrome to do all the updating though.
Firefox and Safari don't support WebUSB because they don't use a Blink-based engine. iOS browsers also won't work because they're Safari under the hood (as all browsers must be under current iOS rules, though that may change soon).
Maybe this is better than downloading a one-off utility from a manufacturer's slow FTP and selecting a firmware file in its file picker and hoping that the combination of flashing utility version + firmware image + my hardware + my OS + the current stellar constellation aligns, and I will still have a working device after this ceremony.
As terrible as this is to say, it could have been an Electron app.
This update allows it to pair with devices like a normal controller, so input from the controller will be sent to that device instead of some cloud server.
Has anyone tried one of the controllers with a Nintendo switch?