Google to shut down Stadia cloud gaming platform in January 2023

Google has announced the shutdown of its cloud gaming service Stadia.

The announcement was made by Stadia VP and GM Phil Harrison in a blog post, where he detailed that the service will go offline on January 18, 2023. All hardware purchased through the Google Store and all games purchased via the Stadia store will be refunded. The Stadia store itself has now been shut down.

Harrison wrote: “A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia. And 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.”

The exec confirmed that employees from the Stadia team will move to other parts of the company, while the core Stadia tech will be deployed across other parts of Google “ YouTube, Google Play, and our Augmented Reality (AR) efforts,” he said.

“The underlying technology platform that powers Stadia has been proven at scale and transcends gaming,” Harrison wrote. “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.”

The writing has long been on the wall for Google, which already had a notorious reputation for killing off its tech. In early 2021, Google shut down its internal game development division and shifted Stadia efforts towards being a third-party game streaming platform. More recently, alarm bells were rung when Logictech launched a new cloud gaming handheld which supported the likes of Xbox Cloud Gaming, Amazon Luna and Nvidia GeForce Now – all services that have largely surpassed Google’s platform – but not Stadia.