So Google announced on September 29, 2022 that Stadia will be shutting down effective January 18, 2023. Quick shut down. I have been anticipating this day since it came out. I loved the technology and I thought the implementation was relatively strong. The adoption by Google was not as strong as I had hoped and I don’t believe there was any first party content.
Despite my stance that Stadia would soon shut down I didn’t want it to happen. I do think it lasted longer than I expected it to. I had hoped that Amazon launching a competitive service might’ve lead Google to be reinvigorated to compete but it seems that the opposite has happened.
I think that my hope was to jump in around year 5 assuming they were dedicated to last that long. I did have a couple titles on Stadia and they both seemed to work well for me. My rationale was that if they stuck around for 5 years they would likely do at least 10 years. It would have been cool to see different hardware devices playing the Stadia services and seeing Stadia span multiple generations of console games. Perhaps if they got a great content creator to make games on their platform or if they broke into an untapped segment (education games?) and innovated and pushed a genre of games along we would’ve seen more.
Oddly enough I don’t feel as confident about other gaming services as I might have anticipated. I thought I would be more interested in Amazon’s gaming platform.
Additionally Google appears to be planning to refund any products purchased through Google Store for Stadia (hardware/software) but not the subscription.
RIP Stadia