The Stadia experiment has failed. On September 29th, Phil Harrison, the VP and General Manager of Stadia, released a blog post stating Google Stadia will be shut down on January 18th, 2023.
In the post, Harrison confirmed that customers will receive refunds for all Stadia hardware purchased through the Google store. People will also be refunded for games and add-on content that they purchased through the Stadia Store. Harrison said that Google hopes to have all refunds completed by mid-January.
“A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia,” he wrote. “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.”
People that currently use Stadia will still be able to access their game libraries. This includes Google Stadia Pro games for anybody that signed up for a subscription before September 29th.
Unfortunately, Google did say that publisher support for Stadia games will vary, meaning that gameplay experiences may be impacted by the shutdown period. CNET claims that some games could lose features early or vanish entirely.
Thankfully, it doesn’t seem like this decision will have a huge effect on employees. The company said that members of the Stadia team will be reassigned to other roles within Google.
The Profit‘s Take:
The most interesting aspect of this story is the refund process. They basically said they’re going to refund EVERYTHING. I have been calling this since the beginning. It’s obviously unfortunate when a big project like this is forced to shut down. But, the human impact is hopefully minimized here. Ironically, they made better management decisions with the shutdown than they did with the actual operation of this service. I got booed at PAX when I said Stadia was hot garbage (and clearly NOT the future of gaming) after its release, so I feel a little vindicated here. The Profit was right…again.
(All information was provided by CNET and Google)
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