Google's Stadia Controller Salvage Operation Will Run For Another Year

Ron Amadeo reports via Ars Technica: Stadia might be dead, but the controllers for Google's cloud-based gaming platform are still out there. With the service permanently offline, the proprietary Stadia Controller threatened to fill up landfills until Google devised a plan to convert them to generic Bluetooth devices that can work on almost anything. The app to open up the controller to other devices is a web service, which previously had a shutdown date of December 2023. That apparently isn't enough time to convert all these controllers, so the Stadia Controller Salvage operation will run for a whole additional year. X (formerly Twitter) user Wario64 was the first to spot the announcement, which says the online tool will continue running until December 31, 2024.

A web service? Why?

[mattventura]

The app to open up the controller to other devices is a web service

But why? Why does this need to be a web service? Why can't the entire app just be packaged up and maybe even open sourced? Why can't they just give us the firmware file and let us install it ourselves? This whole thing just reeks of creating problems that didn't ever need to exist.

Re:A web service? Why?

[ItsJustAPseudonym]

They might have to unlock some kind of per-controller unique key, for which they are unwilling to expose the whole database of controller keys. That would be my guess.

Why would they have them keyed? Maybe to prevent modding the Stadia controller to have autofire, or any number of other cheats. That would be my guess.

Re:

[EvilSS]

It was designed to only work with their streaming service. Most likely, the controller has no capability to be updated locally as it's probably designed to reach out to a website to pull updates. I'd imagine the updates and website also use certs that the controller firmware trusts and requires before it will apply the update.

Re: A web service? Why?

[SoManyBeans]

Itâ(TM)s done through a website, yes, but connects over the WebUSB API locally

Re: A web service? Why?

[EvilSS]

So you just type in a different url into the controller's browser to load the javascript it uses from a local website??

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, someone already figured out a way to do it locally.

https://garyodernichts.blogspo... [blogspot.com]

Re:

[thegarbz]

Most likely, the controller has no capability to be updated locally

No the controller is updated locally. You have to put the controller into firmware update mode manually and then plug it in to a PC. There's really no reason for this to be a web service instead of an app.

I guess the only benefit here is that the web service is cross platform ... providing you've installed the latest chrome.

Does this need to be extended?

[thegarbz]

If someone hasn't done the conversion by now, a full year (well 50 weeks) after the shutdown of the service, what makes Google think that extending this would change anything at this point? I suspect the controllers they are saving from the landfill are long since in said landfill.

Re:

[olsmeister]

What does it hurt? You don't need to complain about everything.

Re:

[thegarbz]

What does it hurt?

A society doesn't progress by developing and supporting regressive edge cases that even the users themselves show no interest in caring about. What does it hurt? There's an extra server (virtual) / service that needs to be maintained, tested for end user changes, sit in the asset register, domains to be controlled, all for people who have for the past year indicated they have no interest in what is on offer.

Nothing in the IT world is free. Someone could be spending time on something more productive.

You don't need to complain about everything.

On the c

Disposable computing strikes again

[xack]

Mac users already have to set their clocks to a time in the past when reinstalling MacOS due to kill switches in the installer, and a lot of old Windows XP computers were forced offline because of certificate expiries because they were never updated. The computer experience is becoming ephemeral, meanwhile you can boot up a Commodore 64, repaired with reverse engineered open source parts and still play 40 years later. Hopefully a jailbreak can be reverse engineered in time for this controller, otherwise you are contributing to the future depicted in both Idiocracy and Wall-E

Re:

[thegarbz]

This is the opposite of disposable. This run-once service turns a special purpose device into a general purpose controller usable with any OS that supports generic bluetooth. Slashdot gets wet for the idea that any time something is abandoned it should be opened up beyond the service it was designed for, this is that in action.