Christian Cawley shows you how to access Stadia on your Raspberry Pi, enabling you to get in some decent video game streaming action.

Christian Cawley

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Christian Cawley got a bit peckish for Pi and spent a week scraping double cream off his Model 3B. Those GPIO pins are a real pain to clean.

Stick to less performance-intensive games, such as Farming Simulator 19.

Despite its size and low power, the Raspberry Pi has proven to be a useful addition to any game streaming set up. While it won’t run modern games, it can stream them from a PC with Steam or Parsec. All you need is the PC or laptop (or custom game server) running on the same network as the Raspberry Pi and a game controller or two connected.

The same is true with Google Stadia. You might have heard about Google’s game streaming platform, which pre-launched in November 2019 ahead of full launch in 2020. It enables the streaming of AAA games to your desktop PC computer, potentially with just a subscription. Want to stream games to TV? You can, using a Google Chromecast Ultra and dedicated wireless game controller (see boxout).

But all the above can be handled using just a Raspberry Pi. With the basic Stadia tier, you could be streaming a newly purchased video game to your TV through your Raspberry Pi. Yet while setup is straightforward, the results aren’t always perfect. The Raspberry Pi 4 is just about able to deal with streaming Stadia games, but there is some lag. Your mileage may vary on this; it will depend on what games you’re playing as much as the natural limitations of the Raspberry Pi.