The moment everyone has foreseen is finally here. Google has officially confirmed that it is killing Stadia, the company ‘s troubled game streaming service. Phil Harrison announced today in a blog post that Stadia “hasn’t been as popular with users as we hoped it would be, so we’ve made the difficult decision to start phasing out our Stadia streaming service.”Stadia will be buried on January 18, 2023.
The good news is that there is no real Armageddon for Stadia customers. Google is issuing a refund that will keep loyal Stadia players from potentially losing hundreds of dollars in lost games. The message states: “We will refund all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, as well as all game and add-on purchases made through the Stadia Store.”This notably excludes payments to the “Stadia Pro”subscription service, and you won’t get a hardware refund for purchases not made on the Google Store, but it’s a pretty good deal. Controllers are still useful on other platforms as well.
Google Stadia never lived up to its original promise. The service, which ran the game in the cloud and sent every single frame of video to your computer or phone, was pitched as a gaming platform that would benefit from Google’s global reach and streaming expertise. While it was a pioneering service, competitors quickly emerged with better scale, better hardware, better developer relationships, and better games. The service did not immediately become popular and reportedly fell short of Google’s ratings of “hundreds of thousands”of users. Google then quickly cut off funding for the division, including a high-profile closure of its own development studio before it could make one game.
Most observers on the internet expected the service to die, to the point that just two months ago
Google’s tarnished reputation has made Stadia’s death a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one buys Stadia games because they assume the service will shut down, and Stadia is forced to shut down because no one buys games from it.