Google is shutting down Stadia, its cloud gaming service. The service will remain available to players until January 18, 2023. Google will refund all Stadia hardware purchased from the Google Store, as well as all games and additional content purchased from the Stadia Store. Google expects these refunds to 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 blog post. “And while Stadia’s approach to consumer game streaming was built on a strong technological foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction among users we’d hoped, so we’ve made the difficult decision to start end our Stadia streaming service.” Employees on the Stadia team will be distributed to other parts of the company.
Stadia, from our initial review in 2019. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales/The Verge
Harrison says Google sees opportunities to apply Stadia’s technology to other parts of Google, such as YouTube, Google Play and its augmented reality efforts, and the company also plans to “make it available to our industry partners , which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed,” he wrote.
Google detailed some of the finer points of the shutdown in an FAQ. Refunds will be made automatically through the Google and Stadia stores, and you won’t have to return any hardware. Stadia Pro subscriptions will not be eligible for any refunds, but you won’t be charged during the lockout period and you’ll be able to access games you may have redeemed as a Pro user until it’s all gone. Google has shut down the Stadia store, so you can’t buy games or in-game transactions.
Stadia has faced rumors of its demise pretty much since the beginning
The writing has been on the wall for Stadia for a while, most recently when Logitech announced its new cloud gaming laptop last week, and Stadia was one of the few cloud gaming services not they mentioned But Stadia has faced rumors of its demise pretty much from the start. Google has a habit of killing projects just a few years after launch, and Stadia, a cloud gaming service from a company with few ties to the gaming industry, seemed like a prime candidate for an early demise.
Last year, rumors abounded that it would shut down after the number of games released on the platform dwindled and the company shuttered its in-house game development studios. When those rumors resurfaced this year, Google insisted that Stadia wasn’t shutting down. “Rest assured that we’re always working to bring more great games to the platform and to Stadia Pro,” the company said in a tweet. Which was true… until today.
Microsoft, which has also invested heavily in cloud gaming, declined to comment. Nvidia (which makes the GeForce Now cloud gaming service) and AT&T (which used Stadia technology to power a couple of game tests) did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Update September 29 at 2:05 PM ET: Microsoft declined to comment.