You don't need a controller to play Stadia. You can play with your keyboard and mouse on PC, or just use an XBox/PS4 controller if you already have one.
This forum is aggressively opposed to Stadia, but it does have some great uses. I wasn't interested in it at all until I tried the free trial, and it clicked for me. Personally as someone who moves around a lot, I don't want to bring a huge console with me every time we move. I also have no interest in upgrading a graphics card every few years, and I only play games occasionally, so it's annoying to go on my PC and try to play a game, only to have a huge update or a driver problem. Stadia is great because I just click to play and it plays, and even on WiFi with very modest Internet, it looks great with hardly any lag.
I also like it for games which already need to always be online--I used the $10 coupon to pick up the Elder Scrolls Online while it was on sale, so I got it for a few bucks. It is great not having to update an MMO or keep a huge part of my small hard drive devoted to a game I can only play occasionally.
Yeah I used to hype Stadia, then I tried it. The lag makes Destiny crucible unplayable. BTW it's the exact same with Xcloud, and I'm sure Geforce Now. None of these services can change physics.
At best I think cloud gaming can become a fringe addition to the gaming pantheon.
That said I thought of a great use case for Xcloud (in my case, since I own Gamepass/Destiny expansions on that service). I was contemplating selling my One X and having no console until the new ones come out (taking advantage of higher current trade in values). Then I remembered there's one more Destiny Quest I need to do for a seal, but it's not coming out until near Nov 10. The Destiny Season ends Nov 10. It was literally timed perfectly where if I sold my One X, I wouldn't be able to get the seal. Then I realized, I could just do it on Xcloud on my tablet! Not ideal, but it would work fine for PVE. It's cool to realize, I dont actually even need hardware to play the game!
But anyways I check the Destiny population numbers through the Charlemagne bot occasionally, and the Stadia community was utterly tiny to start with (the numbers might ROUGHLY look like (daily players) 400k PS4, 300k PC, 300k Xbox, 5k Stadia. The stadia numbers though havent even been holding up as well as the other. At peak they were 8-9k and have declined to sometimes 3-4k They're not even holding up as well as the other platforms. Not a good sign.
Anyways one opportunity for Stadia will be if they could offer a better visual experience than the consoles. Even compared to current gen that's been spotty. They need major back end upgrade to leapfrog the next gen consoles now, which at the least will be slow going.
But I imagine the Stadia player base is so low Google is probably reconsidering investment as is.
