Google Stadia is celebrating its second birthday with free or cheap hardware

On November 19, 2019, Google launched its Stadia cloud gaming service as a work in progress, and it arguably remains one to this day. But one thing that has been steadily improving is the price of admission, and Google is bringing it down even further to celebrate Stadia's second birthday.

You can now buy the Stadia Premier Edition hardware kit with Chromecast Ultra and Stadia controller in fourteen countries, including the US and UK, for just $22.22 or €22.22 "while supplies last." US In the U.S., you'll be able to get any game you bought from the Stadia store for free until November 29th. Google says it's still running a variety of deals on games today.

It's not unusual for Google to practically give away Stadia hardware, and the Chromecast Ultra isn't the company's latest and greatest Stadia kit, but these still feel like the best deals. The previous get-free-hardware-with-your-game bundle would cost you $59.99 in full for the game. Plus, you can do more with a Chromecast than just play games, and even Google's most basic Chromecast still costs $20 on sale. With moderately priced games at $22 or more for free, the Ultra is a pretty good deal, even if it doesn't come with a TV remote like the latest models. It's the only Chromecast with a built-in Ethernet port (in its power adapter).

Google says it now has more than 200 games in its Stadia store and over the past year it has offered nearly half of them to its paid Stadia Pro subscriptions at one point or another. If you started subscribing to Pro in November 2020, and made sure to claim every game on offer, you would have paid a little over $100 for access to 91 different games. Google estimates that it would cost $2,000 to purchase the same game library.

It's unclear how long or how well Google will continue to support Stadia, now that its ambitions have waned. Both Microsoft and Nvidia recently upgraded the hardware powering their cloud gaming services, but Google has released no indication that it may follow suit, and most game publishers will be ready for the platform. . Doesn't seem very committed. (Google reportedly paid tens of millions of dollars per port in the early days, not a sustainable strategy.)

The company doesn't have an updated roadmap for Stadia today, but says there's more to come:

What's next for Stadia? Well, we look forward to continuing to work on bringing the best of games and new features to our community of players so that we can help create a bright future for cloud gaming. His vote:

Keep experimenting with features with the goal of making it easier for players to join the games and try out Stadia for themselves. We are still learning from the input provided by our community and appreciate all constructive feedback!

Expanding all categories of game content - not just more games overall, but new types of games we've heard players demand, including online action games, open world titles, as well as free games, trials and demos Such styles are included.

Bringing Stadia to more devices and making it easier to access, buy and play games on your own or with friends.

Google's most recent experiment has been the free time game trial. One of Stadia's current strengths is that it's super easy to try out: all you really need is a Google Account.