Google Stadia Is Dead: Is This The End Of Cloud Gaming?

Google's promising cloud gaming project is dead before it could make its way to India. Google has officially confirmed that it is shutting Stadia. While the search engine behemoth has confirmed to issue refunds to its users while the game developers are left in the limbo of uncertainty.

Google has confirmed to refund all the hardware purchases made through Google Store, and the service will be up and running until January 18, 2023, giving users a small window of opportunity to complete a game that they would have started on Stadia.

For the unaware, Google officially introduced Stadia at GDC 2019 (game developers conference). At that time, it was touted to be the next big thing in the video game industry, and in less than five years, the project has crumbled into dust.

Stadia is an online gaming service, which allows users with high-speed internet to stream the game on a variety of devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and even smart TVs. The service was limited to select cities, and Google even introduced some exclusive games to lure in more customers. Considering the present development, nothing has worked for Stadia.

What Went Wrong?

While the platform itself didn't have much of an issue, it failed to attract gamers. Before this announcement, back in 2021, Google shut down the in-house game development studio, which was the very first indication that everything was not well within Google's ambitious cloud gaming streaming platform Stadia.

Cloud gaming was supposed to be better than conventional gaming (consoles and PC). It was supposed to reduce the financial burden on the users by offering subscription-based services and also eliminated the requirement of expensive hardware. However, people didn't adopt the service as much as Google would have expected.

Not just Google, other tech biggies like Microsoft and Amazon are also trying out their luck in the world of gaming streaming by offering services like Luna and Xbox Cloud gaming. However, even these platforms are suffering from a lack of users despite having a plethora of features and capabilities.

The report also suggests that even game development studios like Bungie, the maker of Destiny 2 were made aware of the situation after Google shared this update on their blog post.

Source | Via