Google Stadia: the latest news about the cloud gaming platform

December 31st, 2025 is the deadline to save the Google Stadia controller. That’s less than three weeks from today — but there’s never been a better time. Last month, I discovered the controller is finally a first-class citizen in Steam and SteamOS.

The Stadia controller was originally designed to connect to your Wi-Fi network and remotely control games from Google’s cloud servers. But when Stadia shut down in January 2023, the company did an amazing job shutting down the service: it offered full hardware refunds and let you rescue the Stadia Controller by turning it into a generic Bluetooth gamepad instead.

Google made a few mistakes with its Stadia cloud gaming service. Maybe more than a few. Okay, it made a lot of promises it didn’t keep and said a lot of things that look pretty laughable in hindsight and totally pulled the rug out from under its indie developers. We did our best to warn you!

And yet, I don’t think Stadia will be remembered poorly now it’s gone — because in the end, Google did right by its customers. Pay attention, rival companies: this is how you shut down a service right.

Google is launching its final Stadia game today and is promising to release a tool next week to enable Bluetooth connections on its Stadia controller. The last Stadia game to launch on the service is Worm Game, a test game that was technically available on Stadia before Stadia launched publicly in November 2019. Developers at Google have decided to release the game just before the streaming service disappears next week.

“Worm Game is a humble title we used to test many of Stadia’s features, starting well before our 2019 public launch, right through 2022,” says Google in its listing for the newly published title. “It won’t win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team spent a LOT of time playing it, and we thought we’d share it with you. Thanks for playing, and for everything.”

Ubisoft has started handing out PC versions of games originally purchased on Google Stadia in preparation for Stadia’s shutdown on January 18th, 2023.

Ubisoft previously announced back in September that any Ubisoft titles purchased on the cloud gaming platform would be eligible to transfer over to PC, promising to share “specific details as well as the impact for Ubisoft+ subscribers at a later date.” 9to5Google now reports that this migration process quietly started on Friday, December 16th.

Friction is the mind-killer when it comes to cloud gaming. You can’t just click a game trailer to instantly be playing a game quite yet. But this week, Google appears to be rolling out a feature that could reduce that friction: if you simply search for the name of a game in Google search, you might be presented with a “Play” button that can instantly launch the title.

The Nerf Report’s Bryant Chappel appears to be the one who noticed the change, and he quickly discovered it’s not limited to Google’s own Stadia cloud gaming service, either. He says it works with Amazon Luna, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Nvidia’s GeForce Now, too.

For many months, AT&T has been dangling a tantalizing possibility: what if its network let you instantly try blockbuster games for free? The company started by generically bundling free six-month subscriptions to Google Stadia and then began letting its customers stream full copies of Batman: Arkham Knight and Control over the internet. Next, it hinted at something even more intriguing: a try-before-you-buy game service where you could try a game directly from a search result, buy and download a full copy once you determine you like it, and pick up right where you left off.

No current cloud gaming service offers anything of the sort.

Capcom has launched a demo of Resident Evil Village that’s powered by Google’s Stadia cloud gaming tech, letting people test out the horror game in a browser. In a press release, Google says that the idea is to let people try out the game, no matter what device they own. The game and its demo were already available for Stadia subscribers, but now, anyone can try it out for free provided they have a supported web browser and an internet connection faster than 10 megabits a second. You don’t even need a Google account; you just navigate to the website, enter your birthday (the game’s rated M), and click the play button.

As for how the demo looks... you certainly get what you pay for with the browser version. Here are a few comparison shots with the Stadia version of the demo on the left and the PS5 version on the right. (The PS5 version is running at 4K, and Capcom’s demo maxes out at 1080p).

Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service didn’t stick the landing, and it’s been a rough ride since. But today, at the Google for Games Developer Summit, it feels like Stadia might be moving in a promising direction — one that gives both gamers and game developers a reason to pay attention. And the magic word is “free.” Free demos, free trials, free for developers to offer, and hopefully free of the friction that made Stadia a difficult investment to start.

I want to start off with something I wrote last February, when I explained how Google had drastically reduced its Stadia ambitions from what was effectively “become a game company” to “offer a white-label service to game publishers” instead. I wrote:

Google appears to have built its own solution for running Windows games on Stadia. Google is planning to detail its Windows “emulator” for Linux next week at the company’s Google for Games Developer Summit on March 15th. Reddit users have spotted a session at the summit that will detail “how to write a Windows emulator for Linux from scratch.”

The session will be led by Marcin Undak, on Google’s Stadia porting platform team, and promises a “detailed overview of the technology behind Google’s solution for running unmodified Windows games on Stadia.” It appears that Google has built its own Windows emulator for Linux to help developers port games to the service without having to modify titles for Linux.

One year after Google revealed it now saw Google Stadia cloud gaming idea as a mere “technology platform for industry partners” rather than a true rival to Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft, Business Insider is reporting that some Stadia gamers’ fears have come true: the entire Stadia project has been demoted within Google, and its new priority is to power experiences from companies including Peloton, Bungie, and Capcom rather than attracting more games to Stadia itself.

In fact, Peloton bike owners might have already experienced the fruits of those labors — BI reports that Peloton’s very first video game, Lanebreak, was actually powered by Google’s cloud gaming technology, now dubbed Google Stream. (That’s one way to put a game inside your exercise machine!)

Have a gamepad handy and a recent LG TV? You can likely now try Google’s Stadia cloud gaming platform — as of today, it’s an app you can download for your television running webOS 5.0 or webOS 6.0 (read: likely 2020 models or later) in any of the 22 countries that Google covers. You’ll find it in the LG app store on your TV.

LG promised that both Google Stadia and Nvidia’s rival GeForce Now cloud gaming service would arrive on its TVs in 2021, and the company’s made it under the wire — GeForce Now arrived in beta in mid-November. Previously, most Stadia-supported TVs ran some version of Android TV.

On November 19th, 2019, Google launched its Stadia cloud gaming service as a work in progress, and it’s arguably still one today. But one thing that’s consistently improved is the price of entry, and Google’s bringing it down even further to celebrate Stadia’s second birthday.

You should now be able to purchase a Stadia Premiere Edition hardware kit with the Chromecast Ultra and Stadia Controller for just $22.22 or €22.22 in fourteen countries including the US and UK “while supplies last.” In the US, you’ll also be able to get one for free when you purchase any $30 or higher game in the Stadia store until November 29th, though it now appears you’ll get that via a redemption code after your purchase and you may also need to pay shipping (terms and conditions here). Google says it’s launching a wide variety of deals on games there today, too.

Months after we predicted that Stadia would soon become a white-label cloud-gaming service, AT&T appears to be taking Google up on the idea. AT&T is offering a free browser-based version of Batman: Arkham Knight exclusively for wireless customers that makes use of Stadia’s technology.

AT&T confirmed that its new game streaming experience runs on Google Stadia’s tech (via 9to5Google). Google announced the shutdown of its internal Stadia game studio in February. While Stadia is still available and supported by Google, the studio shutdown means Google is relying on third parties to provide all the games, and it opens up the potential for Google’s partners to use the tech.

Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service appears to have lost another top video game industry veteran — kind of. Jack Buser, Stadia’s Director for Games and a former PlayStation exec, is moving to the company’s Google Cloud division to head up “Gaming Solutions,” according to a ZDNet report.

Google confirms Buser is leaving the Stadia group for Google Cloud, providing this statement to The Verge:

Today, there’s only one official way to play Google’s Stadia game streaming service on your 4K TV — the last-gen Chromecast Ultra, connected to the company’s proprietary Stadia Controller over Wi-Fi. That’s because Google hasn’t yet brought Stadia to the new-and-improved $50 Chromecast, and its predecessor didn’t support Bluetooth, meaning the only way to pair a controller was to loop through Google’s servers in the cloud.

But Google now has a workaround, 9to5Google reports. There’s a new “bridge mode” hidden in the latest version of the Stadia app on Android that should let you send controller signals from your phone — letting you play Stadia with your phone’s touchscreen, or even connect another gamepad to your phone, using that phone to route those signals to your Chromecast through the cloud. You’ll be able to use your phone to change your TV’s volume, too, according to text snippets buried in the APK.

Heading into its second year, Google’s Stadia game streaming service is adding more games and making it easier to play without having to pay. The first free game released for the service was Destiny 2, and now it has another multiplayer companion: Super Bomberman R Online will become free today. All you need is a Stadia account, which is completely free. On Android or in the Chrome browser, you should be able to click this link to launch the game now if you’re logged in to that account.

Bomberman is a particularly fitting title to make free, considering it’s got a 64-player battle royale mode that’s exclusive to Stadia, and its lobbies might have been difficult to fill if each player had to pay. Otherwise, it’s an updated 3D take on the bomb-laying and maze-navigating Bomberman gameplay many players already know, which also released on the Nintendo Switch in 2017.

Firing up a big-budget modern video game inside a Chrome browser window for the first time feels like you’re tapping into some arcane magic, like peeking around the corner of technological innovation to see a bright future we never thought would be so close at hand. At least that’s how it felt when I first used Google Stadia more than a year ago.

Last week, as I loaded into one of Stadia’s most high-profile releases to date — Ubisoft’s Nordic-themed Assassin’s Creed Valhalla — on my 13-inch MacBook Pro with a DualShock 4 controller, I was reminded of how much of a technical marvel cloud gaming truly is. Here is a brand-new cutting-edge game, streamed over the internet and playable with the click of a button, no expensive hardware or pricey television required.

Google on Thursday announced iOS support for its Stadia cloud gaming service, following in the footsteps of Microsoft in turning to the mobile web to circumvent Apple’s App Store restrictions. Google says it has been building a progressive web app version of Stadia that will run in the mobile version of Apple’s Safari browser, similar to how Microsoft intends to deliver its competing xCloud service on iOS sometime next year.

But Google intends to beat Microsoft to the punch with public testing of its version in the coming weeks. Nvidia also announced today that it a beta web app version of its GeForce Now cloud gaming service on iOS is available today.

One year ago, Google Stadia charged three ways to try its new cloud gaming service: you had to buy $130 worth of hardware, pay $10 a month for the service, and buy many of its games. But starting on November 19th — Stadia’s anniversary — Google will let you play Destiny 2 without paying a cent.

It might be the single-biggest test for Stadia yet.

Google has added another promotion to help push its cloud gaming service Stadia into more households: now YouTube Premium subscribers can get its $100 Stadia Premiere Edition bundle for free. A Google spokesperson told The Verge that supply for the US promotion has run out, but is still available for eligible YouTube Premium subscribers based in the UK.

Google’s Stadia Premiere Edition features one Stadia controller in addition to a Chromecast Ultra. However, it is important to note that the Chromecast Ultra included in this package is the older model, not the recently-released Chromecast with Google TV. Google has said that the new Chromecast with Google TV will not support the cloud gaming service until the first half of 2021.

Google’s Stadia controller now has support for USB-C audio devices when playing on a Chromecast or via a web browser. That gives you an easy way to add headphones and a microphone, since you can simply plug in a set of wired USB-C earbuds like the Google’s Pixel USB-C earbuds, gaming headset, the Asus ROG Delta, or even the wireless SteelSeries Arctis 1 gaming headset with its wireless USB-C adapter (It works, a Redditor confirms.)

It’s nice that Stadia players have another audio option beyond the built-in 3.5mm jack, and it’s cool and unusual for any game controller to offer USB-C audio, but it still took almost a year for Google to add it after promising the feature was coming.

Google has always wanted its cloud game-streaming service, Stadia, to change how YouTube streamers interact with their fans. Nearly ten months after release, Google is finally bringing its “Crowd Choice” feature to its first two games.

Crowd Choice allows viewers to vote on, say, which team a streamer joins in the game, which piece of dialogue they pick, or other in-game choices the player might make. The streamer can ultimately decide if they want to follow the audience’s suggestion or make their own choice.

Google’s new $50 “Chromecast with Google TV” has supplanted the Chromecast Ultra in practically every way — so you probably won’t be surprised to hear Google is getting rid of its original 4K streaming device. The Chromecast Ultra is now out of stock at every major US retailer, including the Google Store, where its product page redirects to the new Chromecast.

It’s not formally “discontinued,” mind you: Google says it will still be available at “select retailers,” even though we’re seeing no stock at Amazon, Best Buy, Target, Walmart, The Home Depot, Staples, etc., and even though B&H Photo actually lists it as “discontinued” right now.