Google is shutting down Stadia in January 2023 | Catch My Job

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 through the Google Store, as well as all games and additional content purchased from the Stadia Store. Google expects those refunds to be completed by mid-January.

“A few years ago, we also launched a customer service for games, Stadia,” Stadia VP and GM Phil Harrison said in a blog post. “And while Stadia’s approach to consumer game streaming is built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the user traction we expected, so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin shutting down our Stadia streaming service.” Stadia team employees will be redeployed to other parts of the company .

Harrison says Google sees opportunities to apply Stadia technology to other parts of Google, such as YouTube, Google Play and its AR efforts, and the company also plans to “make it available to our industry partners, which is consistent with where we see the future playing the head,” he wrote.

Google has detailed some of the finer points of shutdown in the FAQ. Refunds will be made automatically through the Google and Stadia stores, and you won’t need to return any hardware. Stadia Pro subscriptions will not are eligible for a refund, but you won’t be charged during the blackout period and you can access games you may have redeemed as a Pro user until everything is canceled. Google has shut down the Stadia store, so you can’t buy games or make in-game transactions.

The writing has been on the wall for Stadia for a while, most recently when Logitech announced its new cloud handheld last week and Stadia was one of the few cloud gaming services not mentioned. But Stadia has faced rumors of its demise practically from the start. Google has a habit of killing projects just a few years after they launch, and Stadia, a cloud gaming service from a company with few connections in the gaming industry, looked like a prime candidate for premature demise.

Last year, rumors swirled that it would shut down after the number of games published on the platform slowed and the company closed its internal game development studios. When these rumors resurfaced this year, Google insisted that Stadia was not shutting down. “Rest assured that we’re always working to bring more great games to the platform and 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’s technology to run several test games) did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Update September 29, 2:05 p.m. ET: Microsoft declined to comment.