Google kills Stadia, will refund game purchases

Everyone knows that the moment is here. The company confirmed that it is killing Stadia. Stadia hasn't gained traction with users that we expected so we've made the difficult decision to end the service. On January 18,23, Stadia will be laid to rest.

There is good news for Stadia customers. Dedicated Stadia players will not lose hundreds of dollars in games because of the refunds. All purchases made through the Stadia store will be refunds, according to the post. That excludes payments to the "Stadia Pro" subscription service, and you won't get hardware refunds from other purchases, but that's a good deal. From now until the shutdown date, existing Pro users will be free to play. The controllers are still useful even though they are wired, and a campaign is starting to get them unlocked.

Advertisement Stadia's technology will live on as a Google Cloud product called "Immersive Stream for Games." Google has made some headway pitching the feature as a way to run games on underpowered devices, like Peloton fitness equipment.

It wasn't up to its initial promise. The service, which ran a game in the cloud and sent each frame of video down to your computer or phone, was pitched as a gaming platform that would benefit from Google's worldwide scale. Competitors quickly popped up with better hardware, better relationships with developers, and better games, even though it was a trailblazer. According to reports, the service didn't take off immediately and undershot estimates by hundreds of thousands of users. The high-profile closing of its in-house development studio caused the division to be defunded.

Stadia launched at a time when Google's reputation for killing products was (and still is) at an all-time high. Since purchasing a game from a streaming service only works if that service keeps running, buying a game requires confidence in the company running it. Most observers on the Internet expected the service to die, to the point that the official Google Stadia account tweeted just two months ago that Stadia "is not shutting down."

The death of Stadia was caused by the damaged reputation of the internet giant. Stadia is forced to shut down because no one buys games from it even though they assume it will.