Stadia, the project that was destined to fail

Stadia was a cloud gaming service operated by Google. Using the latter's data centers, Stadia has the ability to stream video games at 1080p

Google recently announced that it will end its consumer gaming service, Stadia, because it has not aroused enough interest from players after almost three years of release.

The moment everyone saw coming is finally here. Google has officially confirmed that it is shutting down Stadia, the company's game streaming service. Phil Harrison, Vice President and General Manager of Stadia, announced in a blog post that Stadia has not gained popularity between users that the company expected, and stated that the service will stop working on January 18, 2023.

The good news is that Google is issuing refunds, which will save dedicated Stadia gamers from potentially wasting hundreds of dollars on unplayable games.

The message reads: "We will refund all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, as well as all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia Store." This notably excludes payments to the "Stadia Pro" subscription service, and you won't get hardware refunds for non-Google Store purchases, but it's a pretty good deal. Existing Pro users will be able to play for free until the blackout date. Controllers are still useful as wired USB controllers,

And it is that game companies are facing a slowdown in the demand for video games since the highs of the pandemic. The short-term outlook for Stadia also looked bleak, as high inflation caused some consumers to cut back on spending on entertainment.

Players will continue to have access to their game library and play through January 18.

Harrison said Google sees opportunities to apply Stadia technology to other parts of Google, like YouTube, Google Play and their AR efforts.

It must be said that several indications pointed to the fact that Google wanted to abandon Stadia, since the last Stadia Connect, an event broadcast online to make announcements, dates from July 14, 2020. Since then, the official YouTube channel has only fed video game trailers.

Another hint of a problem came in February 2021, when Google disbanded its internal development team for making Stadia games.

In addition, on the other hand, Google has left aside many services that promised a lot at the time (basically they sold smoke), such is the case of Google Plus (Google's social network), Google Reader (I personally don't know why they removed this service), Bump (someone heard of it or used it or was it just the Mandela effect) , Google code, among others.

And it is that the fact of mentioning these services that now lie in the graveyard of Google, is that since its announcement, Stadia was already more than condemned to die and it is that from its specifications to be able to run games, many countries automatically went to not even being able to aspire to the service, in addition to the fact that many (and I include myself) simply saw Stadia as one more failure that promised a lot.

Finally I share a fragment of the Google statement on this subject:

Phil Harrison
For many years, Google has invested in multiple aspects of the gaming industry. We help developers create and distribute game apps on Google Play and Google Play Games. Video game creators reach audiences around the world on YouTube through videos, live streams, and short films. And our cloud streaming technology delivers immersive gameplay at scale.

A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia. And while Stadia's approach to consumer game streaming was built on a strong technology foundation, it didn't get the user buy-in we hoped for, which is why we made the difficult decision to start canceling our Stadia streaming service. …

For the Stadia team, building and supporting Stadia from the ground up was driven by the same passion for gaming that our players have. Many members of the Stadia team will continue this work in other parts of the company. We are very appreciative of the team's innovative work and look forward to continuing to impact gaming and other industries using Stadia's core streaming technology.
Let us remember that in July 2022, after a tweet from a user, Google tried to reassure the public by declaring: “Stadia is not going to be closed. Rest assured, we will always be adding new games to the platform as well as the Stadia Pro subscription."