There is a launch event for the new Stadia gaming system in New York. On November 19th, Stadia will be launched. Drew Angerer poses for a picture.
The failed attempt at a cloud gaming streaming service is over. After lots of initial hype, a bunch of scaling back, and promises of better things, Stadia finally comes to rest in the graveyard of killed-off products and services.
It is not like a gaming company just stops making certain console hardware. The game libraries of Stadia's players who purchased hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of titles for use on the service are not available anymore. Each game sold separately was one of the main complaints about Stadia. This problem persisted even after it got more and more free games.
Since nuking the service and everyone's cloud gaming libraries is bad, they are giving refunds.
The actual subscription fees for the service were not included in this. I am trying to figure out if you spent premium currency in the game on cross- platform items if you were to get a refund.
The person is Stadia.
Stadia had two major problems, a lackluster game library and the fact that the industry still isn't ready for a cloud-only gaming service yet. Rivals like Xbox Game Pass or PS Plus are still fundamentally where you can download and play games on actual hardware for a more stable experience.
While Stadia lured a lot of third parties to eventually launch their games on the service, updates and patches often lag weeks or months behind on those games as the Stadia player base was so small it was not a priority. Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo or PC didn't have anything to offer that Stadia didn't already have, due to the fact that the tech giant killed their first party game ambitions. The convenience of playing on the go had its uses, but they were limited, and the service just never took off, despite cultivating a very small, very intense community of die-hard fans.
One of the biggest corporations in the world has never had its gaming ambitions more cloudy as rivals like Microsoft have been big players in the space for years, and Amazon is still investing in its own games and game- related properties.
It is the end of an era. It wasn't a very good era. All the same.
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