What had been speculated happened for months. Google shuts down Stadia, a cloud gaming platform. However, the company plans to save face.
Black clouds had been hanging over the stadium for a long time. In February 2021, the company closed its exclusive game development studios. Recently, the news that the latest “Assassin’s Creed” will not be released on this platform has been widely heard, despite the series being associated with it from the start. Finally, we already know the reasons for Ubisoft’s decision.
Google shuts down Stadia. Servers will be closed early next year
Google is giving players time to complete their games by January 18, 2023. A day later, Stadia will be executed.
reason? In an official statement, the search engine giant announced that the service “has not gained the expected popularity among users.”
However, the company confirms that the cloud streaming technology Stadia relies on will be used in other Google projects in the future. I’m talking about services like YouTube, Play Store, or augmented reality. About such a possibility I was writing More than 1.5 years ago.
It is not difficult in the eyes of the imagination to see, for example, a player who watches an advertisement for a game on YouTube, clicks the “try” button, plays a 15-minute demo, and on this basis decides to buy a title for another platform.
end stage. Google will refund users for their games and devices
Although Stadia turned out to be a financial failure, Google made a somewhat unexpected decision. The company announced that it will return users all purchased games, digital goods purchased within games, and even devices. We’re talking about Stadia Controller or starter kits. Google doesn’t even ask users to return their purchased devices.
This is not the end. Players with an active Stadia Pro subscription on September 29, 2022 will be able to use the paid version of the service until January 18 at no additional cost.
Details of the refund form are expected to be announced in a few weeks. Google is only working on a system that can cover different countries and scenarios. However, the company wants to close the entire operation by January 18.
Google is doing a commendable shutdown, but that doesn’t mean no player will be harmed. No one will give them time to play games on a moribund platform. For example, I’ve switched to Stadia for the entirety of Cyberpunk 2077 and won’t be able to transfer my progress to another platform when the next expansion is released.
Stadia launched in the US on November 19, 2019. Service arrived in Poland in December 2020.
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