Google announced that it is shutting down Google Stadia, its cloud gaming service, at the end of last month and said that it will be refunding the customers for their purchases of google hardware and games, including add-ons.
Google stadia was released on 19 November 2019 and has since added a lot of games to its service for players around the world to enjoy. It acted as a way to play PC games on handheld devices through interactive streaming online. On 29 September 2022, Google announced on its Facebook page and other platforms that they will discontinue Stadia services from 18 January 2023.
President and General Manager of Stadia, Phil Harrison, said, “A few years ago, we 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 decided to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service”.
Refunds will be made to all users for :
- All Stadia hardware purchases
- All game purchases
- All add-on purchases made through the Stadia store
The problem with Stadia kept increasing as time went on, and they were not able to add enough games to get people to try out the service, and the games were all separate purchases. Even after being one of the biggest corporations, Google never even promoted Stadia apart from the first two months of the launch, which also negatively impacted the service.
Despite the convenience of playing pc games on handheld devices or devices that are not strong enough, there was a massive issue with Stadia, or rather the problem with every cloud gaming service, which is latency.
Latency issues are one critical problem that cloud gaming suffers and is a no go for most of the players as it is considered a huge disadvantage in gaming. All of this shows that cloud gaming is still not viable for mainstream online gaming, as players will not sacrifice latency for the convenience of gaming anywhere.