Google Is Officially Shutting Down Stadia in 2023

Google has announced that they are fully shutting down their Google Stadia service. The cloud gaming platform will remain live for players until January 18th, 2023.

They will also be refunding anyone who bought products for Stadia including hardware, software, and DLC. Google says the refunds should be completed by mid-January.

“A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia,” Stadia Vice President and General Manager Phil Harrison said in a post on the official Google Blog.

“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.” Employees on the Stadia team will be distributed to other parts of the company.”

Google states that they will take what they learned from Stadia for use in other departments in the company like Youtube, AR, and Google Play.

“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.”

Google Stadia was originally released in November 2019 meaning that the service will have been live for just over 3 years before shutting down.

Throughout its life, the console was often criticized for having frequent lag during gameplay at launch and a small library consisting mostly of ports that could be found on other consoles. In 2021 it was announced that Google would be shutting down Stadia’s First Party developers. Despite this, it has maintained a dedicated following of users that have enjoyed the platform.

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