Its launch, in November 2019, supposedly ushered in a new era in cloud gaming
Google’s Vice President and General Manager of Stadia, Phil Harrison, has announced the demise of Stadia in a blog.
Apparently, “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.”
It will refund all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store. Players will have access to their games library and play until 18 January next year.
Fit for other purposes?
From Google’s end, it looks like not all is lost. The blog says, “The underlying technology platform that powers Stadia has been proven at scale and transcends gaming. We see clear opportunities to apply this technology across other parts of Google like YouTube, Google Play, and our Augmented Reality (AR) efforts — as well as make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed.
“We remain deeply committed to gaming, and we will continue to invest in new tools, technologies and platforms that power the success of developers, industry partners, cloud customers and creators.
In July, Stadia Dosage suggested that about 2.25 million gamers had tried out the service and between 10 and 20% were still using it. Google doesn’t publish user figures for Stadia.
Not so much fun and games
In February 2022, Deutsche Telekom abandoned its cloud gaming offer which it launched commercially in August 2020, having run the offer in beta mode for a year first.
The decision was announced just 10 days after Microsoft announced its intention to acquire Activision Blizzard, one of the largest video game publishers, for $69 billion. That transaction is still undergoing regulatory approvals and there are reports that Sony met European anti-trust regulators to discuss the proposed acquisition.