Image: Google
Google will begin refunding all Stadia-related purchases in 2023.
Google Stadia is dead. Vice president and general manager of Stadia, Phil Harrison, announced that Google’s cloud game streaming service will be shut down in January 2023, less than three years after its launch and incidentally, just two months after Google insisted that Stadia wasn’t going to be shut down.
In a long post announcing the news, Harrison confirmed that anyone who has bought hardware and games for Google Stadia will be refunded for their purchases. Harrison said:
We’re grateful to the dedicated Stadia players that have been with us from the start. We will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store. Players will continue to have access to their games library and play through January 18, 2023 so they can complete final play sessions. We expect to have the majority of refunds completed by mid-January, 2023.
The reason for Stadia’s shutdown isn’t altogether surprising. Harrison says that Stadia 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.” The cloud-streaming technology that powers Stadia will not be going away, however. Harrison writes that Google is still, “deeply committed to gaming,” and thinks that Stadia’s technology can be applied across other parts of Google such as YouTube, augmented reality projects and Google Play. This technology will also be made available to Google’s industry partners going forward.
The writing was on the wall for Stadia, and has been for quite some time. In February 2021, Google halted development on Stadia-exclusive games and began to dissolve its first-party Stadia Games studios. Stadia shifted to serve as a third-party games platform before earlier this year, it was reported that the company was being demoted from within Google and shifting priorities from games to online demos and other titles. Over the years, Google tried various strategies to garner more interest in Stadia - such as reducing pricing, and pre-installing Stadia in Chromebooks. None of it seemed to work as well as the company hoped.
A few factors stopped Stadia from achieving mainstream success. The first is that its cloud streaming technology is only supported in certain global markets, making it unavailable in many regions entirely. The second is that even in supported regions, users reported unstable gameplay experiences that didn’t live up to Stadia’s promise of high-resolution 4K gameplay with high framerates. Adding insult to injury is the fact that Google announced Stadia at GDC 2019 with a host of promising features, few of which actually made it into the console at launch. Up until 2021, Stadia didn’t even have a search bar. This, from the company whose primary claim to fame is its search engine.
And let’s not forget that when Stadia was announced at GDC 2019, Google had the bright idea of setting it up next to three iconic failures in the games industry: SEGA’s Dreamcast, Nintendo’s Power Glove and the Atari 2600’s ET videogame. Atari infamously buried truckloads of ET cartridges in a landfill in El Paso, Texas because they sold so poorly. Maybe someone at Google knew where this was going all along?
You can find more details on Google Stadia’s shutdown on its official FAQ.