Google Stadia will be shut down on January 18 but at least people will get full refunds

I think this is super smart by Google because if they ever want to try gaming again people won't feel burned, and it can't cost them that much considering their size and wealth. Still it's pretty much what all the doubters and haters said would happen and people will lose their progress and saves and access to games that may not be readily available on other platforms anymore so this sucks.

Buying cloud only access was always a bad idea. Either you should be able to maintain a local copy or you should pay subscription/microtransaction. Always online games like Outriders and Destiny have the same problem. You pay to buy but what you get is really a subscription of undetermined length.

I'm a little bummed, mainly because I used Stadia to access Destiny for free to complete my dailies without having to boot up a console. I used to do the same with xCloud, but that ended when Destiny rotated out of Gamepass. But hey, I get that my edge case does not justify this poorly thought out service. Hopefully the technology gets licensed out, because it is by far the best streaming implementation in my experience.

Nice of them to make the entire platform basically one long free rental, but yeah: not really shocking considering they shut down their game studios. Still, gotta suck for the team working on it.

@rorie: It seems like the tech will live on in various places so hopefully the majority of the team will end up just getting reshuffled in Google. I'd imagine that their career prospects will be better working on projects that actually have a future so maybe it will be a good thing even for them? One can, at least, hope.

Not surprising. I actually bought it in at the start. Not because I had high hopes for the platform, but I was more interested in the quality of the tech. To be honest, it worked really well for me. I am lucky enough to be in an area where Gigabit internet is not hard to get so I'm sure that helped, but I was impressed with the tech. The store was where it all faltered to me. I only did my freebies for a bit and that was all, never bought anything aside from when they gave me $10 to spend.

Hey, at least I got two Stadia controllers which are pretty good for playing PC games out of it.

It really puts into perspective just how massive a company like Google is that they can shut down a thing they've spent tens of millions (maybe billions?) of dollars on, refund all purchases that were made, and just kind of... Keep going like that's just what happens on Thursdays.

It's great they're offering refunds but considering how money doesn't seem to exist for Google it does kind of feel like they're paying people to deal with their electronic/plastic waste more than anything.

@rorie said:

Unless you were paying monthly for Pro...

@mach_go_go_go: Have they made it clear that pro fees won't be refunded?

To be fair Pro was more of a service so people got the value from that on an ongoing basis (as opposed to buying a game that they wanted to be available moving forward) though I guess you also got games as part of the Pro subscription(?) and are losing access to those, so that sucks.

One less logo to put on new releases, I suppose.

The language is pretty explicit - hardware and software purchases only.

I agree re: Pro, but I wonder if the most common use-case of Stadia ("I'm someone who is interested in videogames, but not enough of one that I own discrete videogame hardware") bought into the service without fully understanding that.

@bigsocrates: The announcement FAQ explicitly says Pro fees aren't being refunded.

This aged well.

Nice that they're not charging for access to your Pro library through now until January.

https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/12790109

Q: Are you refunding my Stadia Pro subscription?

A: We will not be refunding Stadia Pro subscriptions. Players who held an active Stadia Pro subscription as of September 29, 2022 will not be charged for access to their Pro library or other subscription entitlements during the shut-down period.

Didn't see this coming since day one. Nope. Not at all.

Bummer for Phil Harrison, though. I like him. He seems like a fine gentlemen.

@facelessvixen: I don't really know anything about Phil Harrison, but I find it hilarious that he was at Sony during their "worst" period, Xbox during their "worst" period, and then at Stadia for its "failure".

Who was the Stadia dude that beefed with Alex like hardcore a few years ago?

@sethmode: Phil Harrison

not surprising- seems like a decent exit as far as megacorps go.

can we- as people- tap the brakes on the 'cloud is the future of gaming' narrative now? i understand the factors influencing this prediction, but it feels like VR in as much as it's great tech that has yet to catch fire.

Not unexpected in the least, Stadia jumped the gun way to early and with hardly any benefits to the service "Paying full prices for games that will perform worse than on a PC/Console"

Xbox currently has the best shot at getting game streaming "right" since they have game pass to support it.

LOL okay, so THAT'S why he looked sorta familiar when I looked up his picture.

@sethmode: sorry I got it wrong, Alex Hutchinson was the one who tried to mock Alex on Twitter, Phil Harrison was just head of Stadia

My mistake!

@mopopolis: Thank you for correcting it because I was definitely not going to care enough to fact check it myself and would absolutely end up making myself look stupid at some point.

I still remember the dude who came on the E3 At Nite set to talk about Stadia. I was sitting in the green room wondering if he believed his own bullshit for most of that chat. The whole "the input from your controller will hit our servers more quickly than your eye sends input to your brain" was absolutely ridiculous.

@facelessvixen: Maybe he's a nice guy, but I wouldn't want him anywhere near my console launch.

@ekajarmstro said:

...I miss ten minutes ago when I wasn't reminded of that.

Don't worry, I'm sure NFTs will be here to stay! Just like 3D TVs and widespread consumer VR!

But at least they're really bad for the climate.

At least I'll get ~$450 back from Google. RIP to the best streaming tech. Hopefully the Xbox team can snag some of the Stadia devs, so that Xbox can make their streaming service actually pleasant to use.

@rorie: Was it ever the case that Stadia controllers have their own network connection to reduce latency to the cloud version of the game? I feel like that was bundled with their talking point of zero (negative?) latency on controller input that made little to no sense.

@bisonhero: Correct. Which means there are soon going to be a lot (well, maybe not a lot) of semi-bricked controllers out there. They work well enough on other devices when wired via USB, but there's a ground-swelling plea for Stadia to update the firmware to enable Bluetooth connectivity to other devices.

@rorie: It's patently ridiculous, how can they promise that with the absolute messy state of internet in the US and around the world? Really, everyone's got a 10ms ping hop to a Google data center? Pull the other one. Pull the entire service, actually.

There goes Stadia

There goes Stadia

Right down Stadia drain

I hope they have a plan to put all those GPUs to good use. I'd hate to see them in a landfill.

@goosemunch: Crypto!

More seriously it seems like this tech is going to be used in other Google applications and potentially for partners (like maybe to support Nintendo Switch cloud-based games and stuff like that) so I don't imagine that a lot of physical servers are going to get thrown out. Google still has plenty of use for cloud-based computing power!

We all saw this coming, but it is surprisingly good of Google to refund the money people invested in the failed project. They learned the hard way that just jumping into something without fully understanding it rarely works.

If only their messaging wasn't the worst thing they could think of, every time they opened their mouth. Or if they put any effort into making it seem appealing. Or did anything other than the bare minimum.

Rip Stadia, put it in the same grave as Google Buzz, Google+, Google Reader, Google Spaces

i figured that they would at least get to a point where they had that youtube challenge integration down and a 'play now on stadia' button on every supported gamepage and through the sheer userbase that would keep them afloat despite the awful 'start a new library at high prices' business-model. Because tech-wise, it would still blow some people's mind that they suddenly can play a level of a recent assassins Creed game on some midrange laptop from 2013.

Stadia had good ideas but a terrible marketing strategy. They should have done something like GeForce Now which allows people who already own their games to play them without purchasing the game again for full price on the Stadia store.

The initial pitch of Stadia had all these ideas but never made it to fruition. It had no killer app to demo their multiplayer asynchronous gameplay technology. No playable demos straight from YouTube. No feature where everyone can play from a specific snapshot.

I was aware Stadia was dying but didn't expect them to go out this suddenly. Sigh, Phil Harrison is the opposite of King Midas, everything that guy touches turns to shit.

@yyninja:

No playable demos straight from YouTube.

I'm pretty sure they're not able to do this, well at least in the EU. Google has faced multiple antitrust cases for promoting search results.

I never got my Stadia to work for some reason. At least this way I get a free Chromecast and a backup controller for the PC.

One of the reasons (but definitely not the main one) I never wanted Stadia was because it's Google running it: The moment a product stops delivering to the demands of shareholders, it gets axed. The writing was on the wall for Stadia the moment it went live.

I feel bad for folks who spent a lot of time wth Stadia as their maing aming platform. I hope their saves will somehow carry over to something else.

@broshmosh: It depends what their outgoing platform ends up being. I was able to get my saves via Google Takeout (I bought 3 games total, it's not like I was in deep or anything), and when I extracted the zip file it was a bunch of .bat and .dat files separated by folder per game (included every timed trial I ever played, which was interesting), so if you're moving to PC it should be relatively seamless to use them. But if you're moving to a console... hell, I dunno.

For what it's worth, I see a lot of people talking about spending their Stadia Stimulus Cheque on a Steam Deck.

(Edit: Changed the verbage from owned to bought, since I clearly didn't own anything.)

Wait, they never implemented the "watch someone stream game x and then jump into game x yourself with Stadia" feature?

@glots: kinda. They did in a very limited capacity.

https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/11144382#stateshare&zippy=%2Cgames-with-state-share

I was offered a free Chromecast with standa from Google even it came out. I played Cyberpunk 2077 even it came out as it really was the only option I had at the moment. Had a pretty good time whole I was unemployed. Not surprised by this news though.

Oh well... but all I can say is, to me, this gaming streaming service had the potential to become more popular one day since not everyone can afford a gaming platform that utilizes powerful hardware so they had no choice but to use that instead.