Google Stadia’s dedicated community faces heartbreak amid service closure

digitaltrends.com:

The Google Stadia subreddit knew about the service’s shutdown just slightly ahead of the official announcement. Users had already been posting about the Stadia Store’s UI changes that day when somebody posted a screen they saw in the app about how the Stadia store was “now closed.” In a few minutes, the whole internet would know that Google had decided to shutter Stadia by January 18, 2023, and refund all hardware and game purchases.

Stadia had a rocky launch and was never able to recover. So while the official Stadia Twitter account tried to squash rumors it was shutting down a few months ago, it couldn’t stop what people saw as inevitable. However, it still came as a huge shock to many in the Stadia community. While Google is offering refunds on purchases, it can’t fix what had become a tightly knit community of people who needed the failing platform to play.

“It’s easy to look back now and say, ‘I knew it’ that it was dead on arrival, and that people who invested deserve it. Most of the people who say that are lucky enough to afford alternative platforms. They don’t see that Google provided a solution to a problem that they probably didn’t know existed,” streamer ColourTV, who put nearly 6,000 hours into Red Dead Online on Stadia, explained.

Now, they’re just left with questions. Will Google unlock Bluetooth on its controller so it doesn’t become a paperweight? Will games allow you to transfer your saves? Most importantly, is there anything out there like Stadia?

Dedicated Stadia players fall into one of two categories: The service was either their secondary gaming platform or their primary one. One user I talked to, Bunion L on Twitter, said it wasn’t his primary way to game, but he used it when he was away from