Google Stadia users complain of "extremely hot" Chromecast Ultras
"You can't tell me that the problem doesn't exist when I clearly experienced it."
Some early adopters of Google's video game streaming service, Stadia, are reporting their Chromecast Ultra devices are becoming "extremely hot", forcing the system to shutdown mid-game without saving their progress.
"I was in the middle of a fight in Destiny 2 when suddenly my Chromecast died and lost connectivity to the network," wrote Reddit user armadeon7479 in the Stadia subreddit (thanks, Comicbook). "I went to unplug it from the power and it was extremely hot. Has anyone else experienced overheating with the new Chromecast Ultras that come with the Founder's Edition? I hadn't seen other posts about that."
"Thanks for bringing this to our attention," replied Grace, a Google representative. "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."
Users remain unconvinced, however.
"Mine has not successfully run a game on the chromecast longer than 10 minutes before it shuts down from overheating!" said Raiotech. "Clearly your supportive customers who paid for the launch of new tech are having issues and your fire back with denial of an issue. This is not how you convince people to stay and trust purchasing things from you. Nobody's perfect, things slip through, maybe a bad batch of chromecast ultras from factory. Whatever it is, acknowledge there is an issue and fix it."
"I want to point out that when it's working, Stadia works wonderfully and I want it to succeed," OP armadeon7479 replied. "That said, you can't tell me that the problem doesn't exist when I clearly experienced it and other users are stating this is a Chromecast Ultra issue that predates Stadia. It's literally to the point where people have had to come up with their own homemade heatsinks."
"Mine is extremely hot and shut off after playing for about 20min. Now it won't even connect to my home account," said ultv336, while XHeavygunX added: "Mine gets extremely hot to the touch also just from watching 4K Netflix or playing stadia. Last night I was worried it was going to catch fire because it scared my wife when she accidentally touched it so I unplugged it as fast as I could."
At the time of writing, Google has not returned to the thread to offer any further support or advice.
"Is there a point to Stadia right now? I'm not sure there is," Wes mused recently, wondering if Stadia's bizarre business model means it's swimming upstream at launch.
"Certainly I'm struggling to work out who it's for at launch. Stadia is great if you really want to play last year's Tomb Raider right now, but it feels niche because on Stadia, last year's Tomb Raider costs fifty quid."
