Stadia Bluetooth upgrade deadline looms — officially at least

Cloud-based gaming is bigger than ever right now, whether you’re using services like Xbox Game Pass or just streaming games on your Switch. But despite this clearly being a viable business model, Google just couldn’t figure out how to make it work, and now we’re quickly coming up on the three-year anniversary of the company shutting down Stadia. While that was a very public failure for Google, the company still tried to make the best of the situation by giving Stadia hardware a new lease on life — and if you haven’t taken advantage of that yet, there’s an important deadline we’re running up against.

When you’re gaming in the cloud, minimizing latency is king, and in order to process your inputs as quickly as possible, the Stadia controller didn’t connect to your phone or your PC directly, and instead used Wi-Fi to communicate with Google’s servers. With those servers no longer active, Google developed a new firmware owners can install that enables Bluetooth support. Once flashed, you can start using the pad like any other wireless Bluetooth controller.

That was a fantastic development, but it arrived with an odd restriction: There was a ticking clock on this offer. Google initially told gamers that they only had until the end of 2023 to update their controllers, after which the web-based Stadia controller flashing tool would no longer be available.

So far, though, Google has never really gotten around to enforcing that deadline. First it pushed things back to the end of 2024. And then it pushed them back again to the end of this year.

But with the hours counting down until 2026 is upon us, Google has yet to extend that deadline again — and this time it looks like the company really could follow through. At least, previous extensions have arrived far in advance, and if we were going to hear anything, it’s likely we would have by now.

If you still haven’t updated your Stadia controller for Bluetooth support, and want to use Google’s official flashing tool, do it now. The process is quite straightforward, and just requires your (charged) controller, a USB cable, and a browser running Chrome.

What if you’re reading this too late, though? Got an early start on the New Year’s partying and are catching up with news on Friday afternoon? You’re not out of luck!

Almost as soon as Google first introduced this Stadia firmware upgrade program back in 2023, users concerned about the looming deadline began efforts to preserve the tool, backing up both the firmware images themselves and the web-based flasher tool to platforms like GitHub. There are several hosted there, but this one from developer Luigi Mannoni caught our eye for looking particularly full-featured: Unlike Google’s official tool, this one can even restore the old Wi-Fi firmware (should you ever want to), and you can either run it locally on your own computer or try out the hosted version in your browser.

Keep in mind that this is a wholly unofficial adaptation of Google’s tool, and if something does go wrong, you’re going to be out of luck, potentially stuck with a non-functional Stadia controller. But considering Stadia’s been offline since early 2023, that’s probably a roll of the dice we wouldn’t mind taking.