Google Says It’s The End Of The Road For Stadia

TheGamer via YouTube

Google announced in September last year that it would be closing the chapter on Stadia, with the service permanently going offline at 11:59 PM PST on January 18, 2023. To many gamers, Stadia's discontinuation spells a sad end for a product with so much promise.

Before its discontinuation, Stadia was a Google-developed and operated cloud gaming service originally called Project Stream. It was supposed to rival Sony’s PlayStation Plus cloud streaming service and others like Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming, Nvidia GeForce Now, and Amazon Luna. The beta version debuted in October 2018, with the final version hitting the market in November 2019.

Google's Stadia received mixed reviews, with most of the criticisms directed at the company's failure to include many of the promised features. For example, Google initially planned to offer in-house-developed games along with third-party games on the Stadia platform but failed to follow through after scraping the plan and closing its studios in February 2021.

Stadia continued to offer rebranded or white-label third-party game streaming services until permanently shuttering this January. Google said its decision to abandon the Stadia project is part of the company’s cost-cutting measures. The streaming service would be the latest Google ambitious project to get the axe under Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai.

The company's stock price is currently down 34%, which comes on the heel of poor revenue and profit numbers at the beginning of Q3 last year. Pichai said his goal is to make Alphabet 20% more efficient – a goal he might seek to achieve by trimming away some products the company deems less viable. 

Related: The Google Stadia Shut Down is a Grim Reminder About Digital Gaming's Biggest Downsides

Other Google LLC products that fell to Pichai's austerity measures include the recently axed next-gen Pixelbook laptop. The company also dialed down funding to its Area 120 in-house talent incubator and slashed the project by half. 

TheRelaxingEnd via YouTube
According to Google Vice President Phil Harrison, Stadia failed to gain the traction the company expected it would. “We’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service,” Harrison wrote in a blog post. The game streaming service was an ambitious project that ran on phones and the Chrome browser and presented Google with a golden advantage to unleash the fullest potential of its streaming technology.

Unfortunately, gamers bemoaned Stadia's comparatively limited library of games and the omission of features Google initially promised would come with the service. Stadia had always teetered at the proverbial edge of a precipice but the breaking up of the Stadia Games and Entertainment team responsible for developing original in-house games in 2021 was the loudest-ringing death toll.

Google said the company expects to complete most of the refunds for all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store and all game and add-on content purchases at the Stadia store by mid-January, although players will continue to access and play games through the end of January.

With Stadia gone, Google will continue hosting gaming apps on its Google Play store and Google Games. Signaling that the Stadia streaming technology won’t go to waste, Harrison wrote, “We see clear opportunities to apply this technology across other parts of Google like YouTube, Google Play, and our Augmented Reality (AR) efforts — as well as make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed.”

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