Google is pulling the plug on its cloud gaming streamer, Stadia. The service, which was launched just three years ago, will wind down with a final shutdown effective on January 18, 2023.
The search engine company shared the news in a blog post, describing that the cloud gaming service hadn’t quite landed with consumers like it anticipated.
“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,” Google announced.
The decision to shut down Stadia doesn’t come as much of a surprise, given that Google ceased developing exclusive games for the service over a year ago. At the time, Bloomberg reported that Google had failed to recoup its investment in Stadia as the service consistently missed targets for monthly users, sometimes falling short by “hundred of thousands” of users.
On the upside for Stadia’s current users, Google will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases, games and add-on content purchased in the Stadia online store. The company said it plans to have most refunds processed by mid-January.
Google said it plans to continue developing new technologies in the gaming sector and that the technology behind Stadia can be applied “across other parts of Google like YouTube, Google Play and [its] Augmented Reality (AR) efforts.”
In the meantime, users can still play Stadia titles now through January 18.
In other gaming news, watch how Pokémon trading cards are made.
Tagged: gaming