Weird, why were they even locked in the first place? I have a PS4 controller I connect to my computer; I never had to unlock it. Was Google afraid people would use their controller to... play games run on their own computers?
The controllers did however have a bluetooth chip that was used for initial setup, so you could connect it to the stadia app and put in the wifi settings. This firmware update google is releasing so that it will work as a normal bluetooth controller using this bluetooth chip.
It also didn't need a bluetooth chip but they added one anyway. It wasn't sold as a general controller so I don't really see the big deal. This is a nice good will gesture.
It uses the same IC for both functions -- BCM43458.
It didn't need to support general purpose, they were not looking to sell the controller for general use (google terrible at hardware support).
People buying it knew it only worked with stadia.
For stadia use, it made sense and connectivity over Bluetooth would have increased latency and complexity to the cloud service.
Moot point now, but atleast they opening it up so you don't have to throw the hardware in the trash
*moot
Still seems really weird not to enable it from the beginning--what would they lose?--but the made the right decisions during design and at the very end, at least.
I can't blame them for not wanting to implement Bluetooth when it wasn't a requirement for Stadia. Bluetooth seems like a nightmare to support. But now they can release this as an unsupported best-effort update, and that's way easier. It probably won't work with some devices since they aren't going to test it extensively, but hey, it's free!
Other reasons may include:
- not having to deal with supporting other controllers on stadia
- not having to support their controller on other platforms
Not that it's defunct, they don't really have to deal with support aspect of things, and this is just a good will gesture so the controllers aren't paperweights.
It was in fact directly using Wi-Fi because of latency.
Why can't we just appreciate a creative solution to a problem?
Your local machine doesn't need to know the input for stadia to work, so why redirect it there?
Stadia had a fundamental physics problem, not an engineering problem. Their "solution" is little more than a bandaid that highlights the fact that the problem exists.
But sure, tell us more with your expertise.
It added few ms latency to a product that requires low latency. It was easy to avoid it (having controllers talk Wi-Fi on top of Bluetooth is hardly a rocket science). It was likely one of many small projects to improve it.
Citation needed. That doesn’t seem to be the case as far as I know. GeForce Now does the same thing and they’re making money.
Another possible reason is that it wasn't seen as a high enough priority compared to other things they wanted to do.
How would it being proprietary reduce latency? That mostly sounds anticompetitive to me
Controller -> Stadia device -> router -> Stadia
is a helluva lot slower than
Controller -> router -> Stadia
And also drastically simplified the "Stadia runs on all kinds of devices" requirements.
It seems like a smart architectural decision.
The data trip through unoptimized stacks on the hardware would really hurt.
And optimizing a diversity of different hardware devices (some of which predate Stadia) sounds like a support nightmare.
So they're adding the ability to connect from bluetooth with this. In the same way before Sony added driver support to Dualshock controllers on PC, you couldn't use them wirelessly. They're not really "locked" more than the bluetooth support just wasn't there.
I only use it on Linux, and I suspect Sony didn't contribute the driver I use. Actually, I don't think PS4 controllers work wired at all, I believe they always use bluetooth and the wire is only for charging. AFAIK anyway.
Very odd that they decided to use wifi instead of bluetooth initially. Between this and the time they spent writing yet another file transfer tool, I'm getting the impression that Stadia was a very unfocused project, trying to do things differently (resume driven development?) when they should have been using off-the-shelf solutions and standard approaches for everything possible.
There are alternative drivers out there (for use with knockoff controllers that try to replicate the offical device IDs, for example), but if you haven't done anything special you're probably using the Sony driver.
Edit: As far as I can tell, the PS5 driver is hid-playstation while the PS4 driver hid-sony. hid-sony has had commits from at least one Sony employee since 2017, but doesn't seem to have originated from Sony.
I guess they figured it was concerning enough that people were going to pick them up just for a free Chromecast Ultra without also giving them a free controller for Steam too.
I've no idea why they didn't make money and had to shut down.
“Locked” is a misnomer [0] ; they didn’t work as bluetooth controllers at all; because it waa a cloud gaming system, bluetooth to a local device that then had a connection (usually WiFi) to the clous backend would add latency, they used WiFi to connect directly to the cloud server, and bluetooth to coordinate with the device that would get the AV stream of the game.
> Was Google afraid people would use their controller to… play games run on their own computers?
They supported that via USB, so they couldn’t be too afraid of it.
[0] EDIT: or, at least, can give the misleading impression that BT controller functionality was active but locked to a specific use case.
Since they’re just way more ubiquitous, the PS drivers are more mature.