In what some have been expecting for months, Google has made the decision to shut down their cloud gaming service “Stadia.” Players have just over three months of time to prepare themselves for the full closure on January 18th, 2023. In an act of good faith towards its soon-to-be former players, Google will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchased through the Google Store, as well as any games and add-on content purchased from the Stadia store.
Google struggled to gain traction with gamers when Stadia launched in late 2019 and has continued to struggle even while other rival platforms surged over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sony’s PlayStation, Nintendo’s Switch, and Microsoft’s Xbox consoles all have considerable catalogs of games as the foundation that hold up their consoles in the eyes of the consumer. Google tried to offset this by making lucrative deals for a number of games to be launched as Stadia console exclusives and for other major AAA games to come to the platform. In the end it wasn’t enough to attract enough gamers over to make the business model work.
So what’s next for Stadia’s high-end cloud tech? Google plans to apply Stadia’s low-latency cloud technology to other areas of their business, such as YouTube and Google Play, as well as making it available to other industry partners.
Image from: Google
