Google has announced that it is shutting down its Stadia game streaming service. The service will be permanently discontinued on January 18, 2023.<\/p>\n
Google will refund all hardware and software purchases to users. Anyone who purchased the Stadia Controller will receive a refund, as will any games and additional content purchased through the Stadia store. Repayments are expected to be completed by mid-January 2023.<\/p>\n
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Google has said it will use the technology that powers Stadia in other parts of the company, such as YouTube, Google Play, and its augmented reality (AR) initiatives. Members who work on Stadia will continue their work elsewhere in the company.<\/p>\n
Google Stadia launched in March 2019 and was greeted with immediate skepticism by the industry due to Google’s tendency to shut down businesses that don’t immediately take off. Many also criticized the high cost of the games considering that the user did not own them and the poor library.<\/p>\n
The service went on for a while, although two years later Google announced it was shutting down its proprietary game studio and the head of the product left the company.<\/p>\n
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The writing has been on the wall ever since for Stadia, despite the company he pretended<\/a> everything was fine and it wouldn’t close until July. As we know now, that wasn’t true at all.<\/p>\n However, the demise of Stadia doesn’t necessarily mean the disappearance of cloud gaming as a whole, with Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon still engaged in their services. It would always have been a long-term investment for these companies, but that’s not the kind of thing Google is known for.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n