Two and a half years after unveiling Stadia on stage at GDC, the game streaming service is officially done. Subscribers will have access to the games library through January 18 of next year, after which point, it will shut down for good. Google adds in a blog post that it expects to have all refunds for subscribers issued by around that time, as well.
Google had not acknowledged previous struggles with the service. In a tweet dated late July, the company noted simply, “Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we’re always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro.” Google, meanwhile, had taken an aggressive strategy of offering months-long trials in an attempt to build an audience.
“[W] 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,” Stadia VP and GM Phil Harrison notes in the post.
The company is framing a kind of silver lining in the infrastructure it built to bring low-latency game streaming to life.
Developing…