Stadia Firesale???

[Metal Ghost]

Hey’all!  Really curious, has anyone ever stumbled on Stadia Controllers being sold at firesale prices?  I’m REALLY surprised that we never did.
 

While understanding that Google would want to put the whole Stadia thing as far behind them as possible, unless they were absolute geniuses with inventory management I’d have to guess that they’d have at least some level of leftover stock. And yes, just driving the stuff out to Alamogordo would certainly be the best way to support said goal of placing this far into the rear view mirror as possible, it just doesn’t seem very environmentally responsible, especially for a huge tech company like Google. 
 

But here we are, with the Stadia Bluetooth mode wizard supposedly going offline at the end of this month. And I haven’t stumbled across any sales or anything. 
 

Pretty disappointing. I’d definitely pick up one or more of these controllers on the cheap. Great Bluetooth pad. 

[jhd]

Could the controllers have been passed along to a reseller (e.g. Big Lots) who then made them available at retail?

 

Not everything is available online; there may be pallets of these controllers sitting in a store somewhere, listed at close to original retail price.

 

There is a regional reseller that I occasionally visit. The website makes it explicitly clear that there are no online sales and that their inventory changes very frequently. Even different locations may have different stock. The only way to determine what is available for sale is to go look on the shelf.

 

Personally I hate this business model as it wastes much of my time, but it seemingly works for the company.

[Metal Ghost]

Yea, that’s a great point. I was kind of hoping for something like when Valve discontinued the Steam Controller, but it’s totally possible they’re unloading them with liquidators.

 

That would still be a lot better than the dump though. The web app to unlock Stadia Controller’s Bluetooth mode is supposedly only Live until December 31st. So I guess it would still work as a wired controller after that. But still a disappointment that, unless Google was REALLY good at inventory management, these haven’t been sighted anywhere (online or out in the wild).