Those who enjoy cloud gaming will no longer be in a position to do so. On Thursday, Phil Harrison, VP, and GM of Stadia, announced that the cloud service will no longer be available by January 18, 2023. Consumers that have liked and used the service will receive refunds for all purchases by mid-January 2023.
Seeing Google giving up on Stadia is somewhat weird. The service never reached the whole globe, and those who had the opportunity to try it did not praise it at all. It was widely known that due to bad connections, you would rarely be inflicted by negative input lag, but it’s still weird seeing Google giving up on Stadia.
The investment and the technology left behind won’t completely perish, as it will be utilized for some of Google’s other services.
The official announcement was made through Google’s official Blog.
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.
We’re grateful to the dedicated Stadia players that have been with us from the start. We will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store. Players will continue to have access to their games library and play through January 18, 2023 so they can complete final play sessions. We expect to have the majority of refunds completed by mid-January, 2023. We have more details for players on this process on our Help Center.
The underlying technology platform that powers Stadia has been proven at scale and transcends gaming. We see clear opportunities to apply this technology across other parts of Google like YouTube, Google Play, and our Augmented Reality (AR) efforts — as well as make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed. We remain deeply committed to gaming, and we will continue to invest in new tools, technologies and platforms that power the success of developers, industry partners, cloud customers and creators.
With all of the above said, the Stadia category on this website will be removed.
