Yes you heard it right, Stadia is finally end its service, and many were wondering why this was not done earlier. What was supposed to be the Xbox and PlayStation killer has now reached its own demise as it wasn’t able to compete with the high standards the two behemoths brought to the table. Their innovation with cloud streaming was unlike any other, and what they were providing to the players was an absolute game changer. Somewhere down the line, they just failed in bringing in enough users.
The vice president and general manager of Stadia, Phil Harrison, announced the end of Stadia through a blog post on September 29, 2022. In his blog post, he has stated that even though the technological foundation of the service was strong, Stadia failed to gain the required traction and pull in those big numbers, for that reason, Google’s cloud streaming service is now being shutdown.
Stadia players, find an important update on Stadia here: https://t.co/IIFRYiIYUu
— Stadia ☁️🎮 (@GoogleStadia) September 29, 2022
Of course many players of the platform would be worried due to the investments they have made for Stadia hardware and the game content they have purchased. Fortunately, in the same post Phil Harrison announced that they will be refunding all the Stadia Hardware purchases made through the Google Store, along will all game and add-on content purchases made through Stadia Store. Majority of the refunds will be completed by mid-January 2023, and the last day to play on the platform has been set as January 18, 2023.
This is not the complete end for Stadia, Google understands the value of the top of the line technology introduced with the cloud gaming platform, and it will now be integrated in their other efforts such YouTube, Google Play and Augmented Reality. Now players are waiting to see how this technology will be integrated in other efforts and how it will affect gaming as a whole.
