Google Stadia “works” on the Steam Deck, but there’s a problem and it’s kind of a big deal

The moment the Steam Deck hit the market, you knew someone would attempt to load up some cloud gaming services in an effort to get more out of the hardware. Valve’s new handheld is incredible, and early reviews are extremely positive, but it’s not perfect. With that being said, early controller drift was already patched with an over-the-air update (Come on, Nintendo, follow suit!), and the company seems quick to respond with fantastic customer service.

No matter what it does though, the Steam Deck is just not capable of playing all games, and that’s okay. Cloud gaming offers an opportunity for users to play more titles and even those that don’t work out of the box with little to no friction. Well, sort of.

Tom’s hardware, Ars Technica, and The Verge have all flooded in to test Google Stadia on the go with the new device, and have encountered a super strange issue that really is a big deal. They were all able to get Chrome up and running (Valve recommended installing Chrome via FlatPak since Stadia won’t run on the built-in browser!) and even got Stadia signed in and “running”. The problem is that they can’t interact with any games using the built-in joystick and buttons!

That’s right, in order to play Stadia on the Steam Deck, you’ll have to connect an external gamepad, at least for now. Now, you technically can utilize the Deck’s built-in touchpads as mouse pointers, so The Verge was able to play Destiny 2 with surprising compatibility, but this is a use case that is unlikely to work well with most other titles on the streaming platform.

One area I thought the desktop would be helpful for is streaming games. Unfortunately, as of this writing, it doesn’t quite work. I logged into Xbox Cloud Streaming and Google Stadia in Chrome (Stadia requires it), and neither of them recognized the controls built into the Steam Deck. On Stadia, you could use an external keyboard and mouse, which works well enough. But I had problems with using a Bluetooth controller through the browser, too. 

Tom’s Hardware

Even though you can connect a Bluetooth controller, early reports indicate that doing so still doesn’t feel great as of yet. Valve did reply to Ars Technica and tell them that future updates to the Steam Deck’s browser will allow Stadia and other cloud gaming services to be fully compatible but gave no exact date for when that would be. The takeaway is that your mileage may vary with an external controller, but that literally defeats the purpose of booting up cloud gaming on a portable handheld, now doesn’t it?