Google has announced that Stadia will shut down soon

Google is shutting down Stadia in January 2023, according to an official blog post by Stadia VP and general manager Phil Harrison that went online yesterday.

“Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, [but] it 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,” said Harrison.

“The underlying technology platform that powers Stadia has been proven at scale and transcends gaming,” the post continues. “We see clear opportunities to apply this technology across other parts of Google like YouTube, Google Play, and our Augmented Reality (AR) efforts – as well as make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed.”

“We remain deeply committed to gaming, and we will continue to invest in new tools, technologies and platforms that power the success of developers, industry partners, cloud customers and creators.”

Developers, fans and even Google’s own Stadia staff were not warned about the imminent closure, which has led to them understandably being upset on social media sites. “Every time something bad happens in games. The people affected, sometimes having their lives turned upside down, learn from the press or Twitter. No emails, phone calls, no heads up, no note on the website.” said developer Simon Roth, who was working on a game for the platform at the time it closed. 

Game developer Rebecca Heineman also had a game set to release at the start of November, and was understandably confused by the lack of communication from Google. “We have a title coming out November 1st. Now we hear about this.” said the developer, going on to call it a bummer.

Google intends to reimburse consumers for all of their Stadia hardware and software purchases, and the entire thing seems like a bit of a mess. Some Stadia users are now asking the tech company to do one last firmware update for their controllers which will enable them to use them with other devices – while others have just asked for CDProjekt to give them copies of their Cyberpunk 2077 game saves before the upcoming DLC releases.