Google Stadia, a cloud gaming platform, will close on January 18, the search engine giant announced in a blog post on Thursday. Along with any games and add-on material purchased from the Stadia store, Google will reimburse all Stadia hardware purchased through the Google Store.
By mid-January, the business hopes to have finished processing every return.
If you have an active Pro membership as of Thursday, Stadia users will still be able to access their game collections, including Pro games. Google cautioned users in an email that publisher support for games might vary and that the shutdown period may have an impact on your gameplay experience (suggesting that some games could vanish or lose features early).
Prior to the open blog post, it seems that Google didn’t inform many developers about the shutdown. creators of Destiny 2 On Thursday, Bungie tweeted about creating “a plan of action” in the aftermath of the announcement. Developer of the Assassin’s Creed franchise Ubisoft said on Friday that customers who purchased its games on Stadia will be able to transfer them to PC through its Ubisoft Connect digital distribution service.
Google discussed compensation for lost income as a result of the unexpected move with at least one studio (Ode Skuul, the creator of Luxor Evolved), according to Axios on Friday.
Phil Harrison, vice president and general manager of Stadia, explained the decision by pointing out Google’s interests in the game industry through its Google Play digital distribution business, cloud computing, and YouTube streaming.
He said in the blog post, “We also created a consumer gaming service, Stadia, a few years ago. Although Stadia’s strategy for providing game streaming to customers was based on a solid technological basis, it hasn’t been well received by users, therefore we’ve had to make the tough choice to start winding down our Stadia streaming service.
According to the blog post, many members of the Stadia team will be transferred to different positions inside Google.
In November 2019, the cloud gaming service was introduced to mixed reviews.
Stadia is only attempting to provide a new method to play through streaming at the moment; it is not releasing new games.
Stadia isn’t yet worthwhile of your time until Google discovers a method to loop in YouTube and create genuinely original competitive large-scale games.
Despite having a number of excellent titles in its catalogue, Stadia never advanced. Google closed its own development studio in 2021, indicating that Stadia was no longer the company’s primary gaming platform.
The competition for cloud gaming that Stadia faced came from Xbox, PlayStation, Nvidia, and Amazon, among others.
Harrison claims that the technology may be used for Google Play, YouTube, and the company’s augmented reality initiatives, so it hasn’t been a complete failure for the business.
Also given access to that technology will be Google’s business associates. In 2015, Sony provided its own streaming service with a boost by purchasing OnLive’s patents, an early game streaming service, just before the once-promising firm folded.
