Three years ago, Google announced Stadia, a cloud-based gaming console for the home that many people thought might be able to compete with the Nintendo Switch.
Google’s Stadia service didn’t seem to take off as well as the company had hoped, so on January 18, 2023, the service will be shut down. After this time, the service will no longer be able to access any games, and players who bought games on the platform will get their money back in full by the middle of the same month.
Phil Harrison, vice president and general manager of Stadia noted
Even though Stadia’s way of streaming games to users was based on solid technology, it hasn’t caught on with users the way we thought it would, so we’ve made the hard decision to start shutting down our Stadia streaming service.
The technology platform that powers Stadia has been tested on a large scale and can be used for more than just gaming. We can see clear ways to use this technology in other parts of Google, like YouTube, Google Play, and our Augmented Reality (AR) projects. We can also make it available to our industry partners, which fits with where we think the future of gaming is going. We still care a lot about gaming, and we’ll keep investing in new tools, technologies, and platforms that help developers, industry partners, cloud customers, and creators be successful.
The Stadia only lasted three years, which isn’t very long for a home console. Both the Switch and the WiiU, which wasn’t very good, lasted five years before being replaced. It would be interesting to see if the Stadia will be replaced by another cloud-based console as technology improves or if the idea of cloud-based consoles will always be less popular than traditional hardware.
