Stadia controllers are getting Bluetooth

[JuanPotato]

Summary

One last game has been added to Stadia, and a self-serve tool for enabling Bluetooth on the controllers will be released next week.

 

Quotes

Quote

 We have some good news: next week we'll be releasing a self-serve tool to enable Bluetooth connections on your Stadia Controller.

 

My thoughts

I'm incredibly happy to see these controllers get one last update so they aren't just e-waste. Huge kudos to the Stadia team. We don't see stuff like this happen very often.

 

Sources

https://community.stadia.com/t5/Stadia-General/A-Gift-from-the-Stadia-Team-amp-Bluetooth-Controller/m-p/85936

[emosun]

11 minutes ago, JuanPotato said:

I'm incredibly happy to see these controllers get one last update so they aren't just e-waste. Huge kudos to the Stadia team. We don't see stuff like this happen very often.

to be fair they could have just never made stadia in the first place which would be a much better solution to the e-waste issue

[Quackers101]

huge kudos? as above.

kinda cool its added support, but still, why couldnt this be from day 1?

[nurax1337]

Thanks for sharing! Got myself a sealed one for cheap now. Looking forward to try it out with bluetooth enabled. 

[Isuck Assimov]

lets hope the latency is not too bad.

I've been using my stadia controller with a cable since the beginning so the controllers weren't ever going to be e-waste.
 

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, Assimov said:

lets hope the latency is not too bad.

I've been using my stadia controller with a cable since the beginning so the controllers weren't ever going to be e-waste.
 

Seems to work fine for me. 

 

 

As an interesting side effect, if someone could confirm. When the controller is in pairing mode, two additional bluetooth devices appear that begin with ArbAx after doing this. Windows indicates they are headsets, but they do not connect. Or at least one connected but then dropped immediately. So I'm not sure if that's extra functionality that "might" work if someone were to hack at it.

 

[Senzelian]

Achievement unlocked!

You did the bare minimum

[qmarchi]

To update on this topic:

 

You can update your stadia controllers at https://stadia.com/controller

 

This will be the last update from the Stadia team, at least they did The Right Thing. Here's to hoping the rest of Google learns from the positive reception on this.

 

[nurax1337]

Is there any downside to switching to bluetooth?

Does anything besides Stadia require the WLAN functionality of the controller that will be permanently disabled with the switch?

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, nurax1337 said:

Is there any downside to switching to bluetooth?

Does anything besides Stadia require the WLAN functionality of the controller that will be permanently disabled with the switch?

Well considering Stadia shuts down today, there is no functionality being lost.

 

The only functionality that is "effectively broken" after the update is apparently Bluetooth headset support. My feeling here is that the controller only has one radio, so it can't actually use the headset profile simultaneously with the controller profile for whatever reason. If you want to use the controller as a USB DAC, you have to plug in your headset into the controller while it's powered OFF first, then plug in the USB cable. It'll then work as a USB DAC. Just there's no on-device volume control. If you plug in the headset while it's already on, it will be at like the lowest volume setting. However this USB DAC appears to have a fair amount of noise and is not better than the onboard PC audio I find. So unless you're using a 3.5mm headset with the controller, it's not much of a loss anyway.

 

I always used the controller in USB mode anyway didn't even realize the headset port worked.

[LAwLz]

On 1/13/2023 at 11:03 PM, Quackers101 said:

huge kudos? as above.

kinda cool its added support, but still, why couldnt this be from day 1?

Because there was no point in doing this on day 1.

The entire point of the Stadia controller was that it didn't use Bluetooth. It made its own connection to the Stadia servers which reduced latency. Now that Stadia is dead, they are enabling it to function like a regular controller. Making it function over Bluetooth like a regular controller would have defeated the entire point of it.

 

I guess the argument could be made that they should have allowed it to do both, but again, that was not the point of the product and would probably just have caused issues with very little payoff. People who want Bluetooth controllers probably weren't looking at the Stadia Controller to begin with.