A number of gamers are reporting Stadia games crashing. That’s nothing particularly new or interesting, as games do crash every now and again, after all, but it’s why they’re crashing that’s curious. According to some, Chromecast overheating is the source of all their troubles. It may be that graphically-intense games like Destiny 2 are just too much for some Chromecast Ultra devices, but it also might not be the Stadia’s fault.
A submission on the /r/Stadia subreddit opens with someone claiming that their Chromecast Ultra had suddenly died in the middle of a Destiny 2 fight. The OP went to find out what the problem was, only to find that his Chromecast Ultra was much warmer than he expected.
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“I was in the middle of a fight in Destiny 2 when suddenly my Chromecast died and lost connectivity to the network,” began the submission from the Redditor. “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.”
The replies have a mix of people complaining about there being yet another problem and one or two people who have also heard about Stadia games crashing due to Chromecast overheating. The OP said that this happened “about 3–4 hours in my session.” The solution, it seems, lies somewhat back in time.
Several submissions on the /r/Chromecast subreddit note that the device is occasionally prone to overheating problems. While most users say that their device gets warm or even hot, only a handful appear to have issues severe enough to cause the streaming device to shut down, or worse.
“[My Chromecast] got so hot that the HDMI part came detached from the circuit board!” read one comment on the /r/Chromecast subreddit from earlier in the year. “That was a 1st gen one. Google was supposed to get back to me on sending me a replacement. They never did.”
“It was giving me trouble with Prime Video,” read another comment from a more recent /r/Chromecast submission. “The episode would play for about 10-15min and then it would buffer and hang until I reset it. That’s when I noticed it was burning hot.” That same user was showing off a heatsink that they had rigged up to their Chromecast to deal with the problem.
As best as we can tell, it appears that the Chromecast overheating issue is limited to a small number of units that shut down under stress. Earlier examples were typically related to video streaming, but it’s possible that we’ll see more issues of Stadia games crashing as time goes on.
