Google has announced plan to shut down its cloud gaming service Stadia which is less than three years after launching the service.
Stadia was launched in November 2019 as part of Google’s aggressive expansion into gaming. But on Thursday, the company said it had “made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.”
According to Business Insider reports going by the firm announcement, users will have access to their games until 18 January 2023, and all hardware purchases made through the Google Store will be refunded, the company said.
Google said Stadia “hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected.”
Google said that it still sees opportunities for the technology that powered Stadia, and that it would apply it to other sectors of its company like Google Play and YouTube.
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Signs of trouble had been bubbling up. Last year, Google said it was closing its internal Stadia game studio in favour of helping game makers “take advantage of our platform technology and deliver games directly to their players.”
Further, Insider’s Hugh Langley reported earlier this year that Google had “deprioritized” the Stadia consumer platform — as in, the games — and was instead focusing on striking deals with companies like Bungie to “salvage” the technology.
