Google Stadia is shutting down, for good

polygon.com:

Google is officially shutting down its ambitious game streaming project, Stadia, said Phil Harrison, vice president and general manager of Stadia, in a blog post published Thursday. The announcement comes less than three years after the cloud-gaming console launched.

Stadia will shut down in January 2023.

Harrison said that players who bought Stadia hardware and games will get a refund for their purchases.

“We’re grateful to the dedicated Stadia players that have been with us from the start,” Harrison said. “We will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store. Players will continue to have access to their games library and play through January 18, 2023 so they can complete final play sessions. We expect to have the majority of refunds completed by mid-January, 2023. We have more details for players on this process on our Help Center.”

Harrison added that the cloud-streaming technology that powered Stadia could power other Google products, and that Google remains “deeply committed to 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,” Harrison said. “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.”

Google Stadia was officially revealed in March 2019, at that year’s Game Developers Conference. The cloud-gaming platform launched in November that year.

Develop