“While Stadia’s approach to consumer game streaming has been built on a solid technology foundation, it has not received the user support it expects,” Google said in a statement. So we made the difficult decision to end it.”
Purchases will be returned
The Stadia Store has now closed, but the servers will remain active until January 18, 2023 to allow players to complete the games they have started. While most of them will continue to function normally until then, Google hasn’t ruled out gameplay issues for some of them.
“We will refund all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on purchases made through the Stadia Store,” Google adds. Subscriptions are non-refundable, but players with an active subscription as of September 29, 2022 will not be charged after that.
This is a big setback for Google, which promised to revolutionize the world of video games with Stadia, which wanted to be the Netflix of video games. But the concept, promising on paper, was not appealing, in part because the catalog was too limited at the time of launch and offers were difficult to read. Stadia has gradually gone into oblivion.
Until February 2021, when Google announced it was shutting down Stadia Game and Entertainment, the studio was supposed to be developing exclusive games. And Jade Raymond, previously appointed head of the Ubisoft studio, left to start her own studio. Google still hoped to rely on third-party studios to develop its game catalog.