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.
But sure, tell us more with your expertise.
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.
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.
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.
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.