Google’s vice president and General manager of Stadia, Phil Harrison, has confirmed that their flagship cloud gaming streaming service will shut down only after 3 years of operation on January 18th, 2023. He wrote in a blog post:
“A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia. And while Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.”
He said that employees from the Stadia team would be distributed throughout the company, and the technology behind it would still be available to apply to other parts of google and for future collaborations with industry partners like AT&T’s latest attempt to stream Batman: Arkham Knight to smartphones.
Google will issue refunds for all the purchases, including hardware purchased from the Google store and software (games and add-ons) purchased from Stadia stores. You will not be required to return any hardware. If you purchased your Stadia hardware from a physical retailer like Best Buy or Google stores in New York, you would not be eligible for a refund. Subscriptions to Stadia Pro will not be refunded, but you can play your games in Pro without incurring any additional charges until January 18th, 2023.
Since its launch, Stadia has been dogged by rumors that it wasn’t up to the task. The technology was outstanding but promised features were missing, and the launch library was lacking compared to other video gaming brands. Some tech reviewers found the product difficult to recommend to anyone except early tech adopters.
Stadia’s first in-house game development studio was shut down last year, and rumors were circulating that Stadia was shutting down after the number of games released to the platform slowed. When the rumors surfaced again this year, Google stated, “Stadia is not shutting down.” They reportedly invested millions of dollars per game in making it competitive. Still, unfortunately, this support to the service resulted in no success, and Stadia will now be considered as another shuttered project of Google, among its 200 other canceled endeavors like Google Plus and Google Cardboard.
