After Trying To Deny The Obvious, Google Announces It’s Shutting Down Stadia

While Google’s Stadia game streaming service arrived with a lot of promise, it generally landed with a disappointing thud.

A limited catalog, deployment issues, and a quality that couldn’t match current gen game consoles meant the service just never saw the kind of traction Google (or a lot of other people) originally envisioned. Developers have been consistently abandoning the platform, and Google has consistently sidelined the service, even shutting down its own development efforts as a parade of executives headed for the exits.

Back in July, rumors began to emerge that Google would soon kill the effort. Google tried to deny those rumors at the time, insisting that the project was very much alive:

As it turns out, the leaks were right. In a blog post, Stadia VP and GM Phil Harrison announced that Google would soon be shutting down the platform:

…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.

The service will remain live until January 18th, 2023. Google is refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made via the Google store, and all game purchases made through the Google Play store (I have a Premiere edition Stadia bundle I never bothered to even open). Employees will be shifted to other parts of Alphabet, and the promising underlying tech will likely be used on other Google platforms.

Game streaming does probably have a future, but it was simply too difficult to disrupt an industry dominated by Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, whose products (including some of their own streaming efforts) still generally provided a superior gaming experience with a far larger catalog of actual titles.