Google announced that it’d shut down the Stadia platform and refund all purchases, including hardware, software and DLCs. The service will remain live till January 18, 2023, and mid-January will process the refunds.
The company seems to have given at least some thought to customers who had put their faith in Stadia. Refunds will be made automatically through Google and Stadia stores, and any shipped hardware doesn’t need to be returned. Stadia Pro customers aren’t eligible for a return, but they’ll not be charged during the shutdown period and can access games they might have otherwise redeemed until the service shuts down.
As for the service itself, the Stadia store has been closed for the service itself, so in-game transactions or game purchases aren’t allowed. Google employees working on Stadia will be distributed to different parts of the company where they’ll “carry this work forward”.
Google is notorious for killing projects off after just a few years of launching them, and the writing has been on the wall for Stadia practically since its launch. Even during Logitech’s recent gaming handheld launch, Stadia was one of the few cloud gaming services left out.
The service has been taking heat since its launch, and rumours of an imminent shutdown have been around. After Google closed its in-house game development studio and the number of games released on Stadia slowed down, rumours were once again afoot claiming that the service would be shut down.
Google defended Stadia at the time by ensuring users that the service wasn’t shutting down at all and that the company was working on bringing more games to the platform.
That said, in the face of other, more successful completion such as Microsoft and Nvidia, Stadia seems to have failed to be up to the mark. This shutdown will also affect AT&T, at least in some capacity, as the company was using Stadia tech to power some of its game trials.
In the News: Intel’s Arc A770 starts at $329; Shipping to begins on October 12
