Google Stadia closes
Google Stadia closes its doors confirming the numerous rumors that have been circulating for several weeks on the possibility of being close to the end of the cloud gaming project. The service shutdown date is scheduled for January 23, 2023, so until that day you can have fun on compatible media and devices. What will happen to those who have subscribed and / or bought games or hardware? Google has certainly not presented itself unprepared and has already made it clear how it will handle reimbursement practices between now and next January, let's find out more.“Although the approach to streaming games for Stadia users is it was built on a solid technological base, it failed to gain the necessary traction with the audience we expected, so we made the difficult decision to start closing our streaming service ", Google announced in a rather emblematic way on the official blog, making it official the end of life of the service that allows you to play streaming from a large variety of devices, even low-performance ones, since all processing takes place remotely on high-performance systems, as we told you in our in-depth review. Evidently, however, the efforts made by Google do not seem to have reached the necessary audience of users and therefore the expiration date is already set on January 18, 2023.
Until that day you can play normally then the shutter will be closed and all progress and saves will be lost forever without the possibility of saving them on other platforms. The refund policy will be total involving the purchase of Stadia hardware such as Stadia controllers, Founders Edition, Premiere Edition (which will not have to be returned, remaining to the user) and Play and Watch packages with Google TV through the Google Store and software purchases such as games and add-ons from the Stadia store. Everything should happen automatically, while the waiting times promised by Google assume a full resolution of the refunds by mid-January 2023, therefore in correspondence with the closing.
RIP Google Stadia: the latest news on the discontinued cloud gaming service
Google announced on September 29th, 2022, that its Stadia cloud game streaming service will be terminated in late January 2023. You can no longer make purchases through the platform, and notably, Google is offering refunds to gamers for everything that they might have purchased during its three-year existence: controllers, games, and all.
Despite coming to a close (which many predicted given Google’s tendency to kill projects instead of letting them fizzle out), Google arguably succeeded at delivering on its promise of bringing cloud game streaming to a bunch of screens before Microsoft, Sony, and Amazon had formal plans to do the same. It was also novel in the industry for being a platform that didn’t require any hardware buy-in on the side of the user; you could plug a controller you already owned into your computer and get started by launching Google Chrome. Here’s our original review from 2019, for old times’ sake.
We’re taking a look back and a look forward to dig more into Stadia while we still can. You’ll find all posts about the death of Stadia — and possibly the remnants of it that will live on — rounded up in this StoryStream.