American tech giant Google has announced that it will be ending its game streaming service Stadia. It will be finally shut down on January 18, 2023.
According to GSM Arena, the company will be refunding all hardware and software purchases to users. All the people who bought the Stadia controller will get a refund. Also, for any game and add-on content purchased through the Stadia store. The refunds are expected to be completed by mid-January 2023.
As per Google, the technology that powers Stadia will be used in other parts of the company, such as YouTube, Google Play, and its Augmented Reality (AR) efforts.
Google Stadia was launched in March of 2019 and received immediate scepticism from the industry due to the company's tendency to close businesses that don't immediately take off. Many also criticized the high cost of games considering the user did not directly own them and the substandard library.
Even though two years later Google announced that it is closing its first-party game studio and the head of the product left the company, the service hobbled along for a while.
Stadia's demise doesn't necessarily mean the end of cloud gaming as a whole, with Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon still committed to their services. It was always going to be a long-term investment for these companies but that's not the sort of thing Google is opting for, according to GSM Arena.
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