Alex Gibson
The news comes by way of a blog post from Google earlier today in which Stadia vice president and GM Phil Harrison explained:
“A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia, and while Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, 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.”
Google staff assigned to Stadia are being moved to other parts of the company as Google plans to redistribute its cloud streaming tech to subdivisions like YouTube and Google Play.
“We will be offering refunds for all Stadia hardware purchases (Stadia Controller, Founders Edition, Premiere Edition, and Play and Watch with Google TV packages) made through the Google Store and software transactions (games and add-on purchases) through the Stadia store. Stadia Pro subscriptions are not eligible for refund, however you will be able to continue playing your games in Pro without further charges until the final wind down date.“
Today’s news follows on from a string of rumors last year suggesting Google had plans to shut down Stadia after it admitted to winding down first-party development of new games. That was only three months before its VP and head of product development at the time, John Justice, left the company. Concerns were later allayed with a Tweet that insisted there were no such plans.
— Stadia ☁️🎮 (@GoogleStadia) July 29, 2022 We’ll never know how long ago Google was considering closing its Stadia service, but the above Tweet has aged like milk after today’s big announcement.
