Along with complaints of games not hitting 4K/60 FPS at launch, Google Stadia has another rather curious complaint. Many users have complained about the service overheating their Chromecast Ultra devices. Some claimed that the device runs hot when streaming as is but while using Stadia, the Chromecast Ultra would shut down outright.
Responding to these issues on the official sub-reddit, community manager GraceFromGoogle said, “We know any sort of heat on a device can be worrisome, but we can confirm there is no thermal overheating issue with Chromecast Ultra. During normal usage (like watching cat videos on YouTube), the surface of the device may get warm to the touch, but this is working as designed. The team has done extensive testing on the hardware, services and games — this includes tests of long Stadia play and video sessions — and have not seen thermal shutdown problems.”
Naturally, some aren’t satisfied with this response. Given that the testing conditions for the device in Google’s labs is unknown,, deducing the core issue for home users is even more difficult. Then again, the issue could be confined to a few units and not widespread.
Whatever the case may be, users are advised to report any issues on the Stadia Help page. As far as Stadia’s current popularity goes, it’s not looking too pretty with the dedicated app only seeing 175,000 downloads. The bandwidth consumed by the service is also fairly hefty with reports claiming 7 GB of data consumed per hour for 1080p streams. We’ll see how things pan out for the service in the coming months especially when its free tier arrives next year.