Is Your Stadia Controller Now Landfill?

Google is closing Stadia, but don’t bin the controller

Future Publishing via Getty Images

Google Stadia is soon to be no more, with Google announcing that the service will shut down in January 2023.

The company is promising to refund anyone who bought Stadia hardware, which may come as some comfort to people who bought a Stadia controller as part of the Founder’s Edition or otherwise. But it doesn’t prevent the waste of a perfectly good piece of hardware. Handily, however, that Stadia controller isn’t completely useless, even when Google finally pulls the kill switch on its streaming gaming service in mid-January.

The Stadia controller works fine as a standard games controller on both Windows PCs and Macs.

There are limitations here. You can only use the device as a wired controller, it doesn’t work wirelessly as a standard Bluetooth controller. The Stadia controller does have Bluetooth built in, so now Google is closing Stadia, it would be decent of the company to let people use it as a standard Bluetooth controller. I’m not holding my breath, though.

If you’re playing Steam games on your PC or Mac, you should find the controller is automatically detected and you can dip into the Steam preferences and calibrate the controller and toggle features such as rumble (yes, rumble works by default in Steam games).

Ironically, it also works with Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming service and Nvidia’s GeForce Now if you’re looking for alternative cloud gaming services, although we didn’t get the rumble when streaming a game via Microsoft’s service.

It’s not only computers that you can use the Stadia controller with. Using a USB-C to USB-C cable, it also worked perfectly well with my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

The one device I couldn’t get it to work as a standard wired controller for was my iPad Pro, which suggests it’s unlikely to work on an iPhone either. If you know different, please let me know using the comments below.

So, even though it’s the end of the road for Stadia, there’s still plenty of life left in the Stadia controller. And even if you can’t make use of it yourself, you might be able to sell it on eBay and effectively get more than your money back on the hardware, when you take into account Google’s forthcoming refund.