Google is sending Stadia to its infamous graveyard of canceled services

Daniel Sims

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What just happened? From the beginning, there were fears that Stadia would end up in Google's infamous graveyard of canceled services. Those fears have now come to pass, but the death of Stadia is far from the end of cloud gaming as competing services continue to expand.

Google has announced it will shut down Stadia for good on January 18, 2023. The company has already halted all Stadia-related transactions on its store and is preparing full refunds for most Stadia purchases.

Anyone who bought Stadia hardware like the controller or a Stadia Chromecast bundle through Google's store should receive a refund by January 18. Unfortunately, those who purchased Stadia products through retail stores like Best Buy are out of luck.

The company will also refund Stadia games and in-game transactions, but not Stadia Pro subscriptions. Current Pro subscribers can keep using premium features free of charge between now and the shutdown date.

Stadia launched in 2019 as a way to play high-end games via the cloud without spending hundreds of dollars on a game console or powerful PC. The service included a free tier, a subscription with a selection of games, and a library of titles to buy outside the subscription.

Unfortunately, Stadia struggled to find a large enough audience interested in its games who didn't prefer to run them locally on console or PC. Google shut down Stadia's first-party game studio in February 2021.

A year later, the company pivoted Stadia toward offering backend cloud services to companies like Peloton, Capcom, and Bungie, while maintaining its customer-facing streaming service. Google will keep using Stadia's underlying technology for that purpose after next January, also utilizing it to support YouTube, Google Play, and augmented reality tech.

As recently as the end of July, Google denied reports it was shutting down Stadia, but it seems a lot can change in just two months.

Meanwhile, other cloud gaming services like Nvidia's GeForce Now and Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming show no signs of slowing down. Earlier this year, both services provided a workaround for playing Fortnite on iOS after Apple banned the title from its app store. GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud are also coming to devices like Samsung TVs and Logitech's upcoming G Cloud handheld.

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Best news all week.


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Gosh, remember when the gaming media was all abuzz about this trash heap of a service and how Google taking over gaming was fait accompli? Let's just sit a moment and bask in how wrong they were.

From the beginning, there were fears that Stadia would end up in Google's infamous graveyard of canceled services.

No, I distinctly remember the opposite - my hope was that it would end up in the graveyard.
 
The writing has been on the wall for a while now.

And I think it was just a stupid business model. Like, who wants to waste money paying for a cloud gaming subscription AND also buy the games separately (locked to the account).

Might as well go Games Pass and stream those games for just the sub price. Or go the Nvidia route and play your owned games through their stuff...
 
The writing has been on the wall for a while now.

And I think it was just a stupid business model. Like, who wants to waste money paying for a cloud gaming subscription AND also buy the games separately (locked to the account).

Might as well go Games Pass and stream those games for just the sub price. Or go the Nvidia route and play your owned games through their stuff...
^^ This, Google missed the mark when you had to buy games from them for Stadia. I already have games that I could stream but I'm not buying them again. Nvidia does a better job of supporting games you own.
 
What made it fantastic.
if google releases a console the must sell it not stop it from release a few monhs later before relase.
atari did it and they are now BACk.
 
Not sure why there is so much hate for Stadia. I've had an account for two years and used an Xbox Bluetooth controller and played off my Samsung TV. It worked very well with no latency issues on the west coast of Canada. I used the free version and purchased a few games to play.

Not everyone wants a bulky console that consumes a decent amount of electricity sitting next to their wall mounted TV.
 
Not sure why there is so much hate for Stadia. I've had an account for two years and used an Xbox Bluetooth controller and played off my Samsung TV. It worked very well with no latency issues on the west coast of Canada. I used the free version and purchased a few games to play.

Not everyone wants a bulky console that consumes a decent amount of electricity sitting next to their wall mounted TV.
Not everyone wants to own nothing and be happy.

Stadia and its cretinous hangers-on did not mince words: they intended to displace the current model of gaming, that their intent was to be the "future", and that all gaming henceforth would be streamed from central servers thereafter, whether PC, console, or mobile, whether people wanted to render and mod from their own systems or not. You were the vanguard of a dark future where all would consume product and get excited for next product, and now you are dust.

Its made your embarrassing and utter downfall all the sweeter to savor. Feast, gorge yourself on crow, and never return to these lands. Argentina will be insufficient to hide the shame of your ignominious defeat. BE GONE.
 
The writing has been on the wall for a while now.

And I think it was just a stupid business model. Like, who wants to waste money paying for a cloud gaming subscription AND also buy the games separately (locked to the account).

Might as well go Games Pass and stream those games for just the sub price. Or go the Nvidia route and play your owned games through their stuff...

You missed the complete point of stadia. You pay a one fee a month and you have access to the latest games of pick without having to have a high end machine at home in order to play these games (and pay a independent fee for every legal copy as well).

Stadia works, it just depends on the type of use case here really. You cant expect cloud gaming to work 100% on latency dependent FPS games, but it does work well in RPG or whatever is'nt so dependend of latency's.

Second; users will need Glassfibre for best / lowest latency towards the nearby DC, otherwise it wont work.

Third: google is actually refunding it's users. I mean thats professional.
 
Launched too early..
shutdown too early..

should have waited till 5G became 'mainstream' and widely available and affordable.
 
I signed up for a couple of months and found it to be a pretty decent service. Bear in mind this was mostly for my 6 year old to have a play around and sample a few games so I was far from a FPS 120htz 2ms response time use case
 
This has been predictable for ages there is always a big push then nothing google is not into long term investments
 
Google continue to throw money from their data-scraping empire at other less nefarious ventures and fail then pull the plug shafting huge amounts of people along the way.
 
Look on the bright side, at least Google it's not buying anymore GPU's from Nvidia.
China was banned also. Miners not this year or next, let's hope so.
 
Crazy, who could have predicted that a gaming service based on internet speed wouldn't work in a country with overpriced crappy internet speed and data caps?
 
You missed the complete point of stadia. You pay a one fee a month and you have access to the latest games of pick without having to have a high end machine at home in order to play these games (and pay a independent fee for every legal copy as well).

Stadia works, it just depends on the type of use case here really. You cant expect cloud gaming to work 100% on latency dependent FPS games, but it does work well in RPG or whatever is'nt so dependend of latency's.

Second; users will need Glassfibre for best / lowest latency towards the nearby DC, otherwise it wont work.

Third: google is actually refunding it's users. I mean thats professional.
If anything you missed the point of why no one wanted to sign up; yet another platform to buy and lock games to. You didn't even try explaining how it's somehow better value than GP or Nvidia's offering.

I'm not saying that Stadia's experience wasn't good, that doesn't matter when I can't play Stadia games outside of the platform without paying for another copy.

And great! It's the least a giant company like Google should do for cancelling the service.
 
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