Google Is Killing Stadia, And Refunding Every Purchase Ever Made

Google Stadia, Google’s long-suffering attempt at a cloud gaming streaming service, is finally dead. After lots of initial hype, a bunch of scaling back, and promises things would get better, Stadia finally comes to rest in the Google graveyard of killed-off products and services, the way many predicted it eventually would.

What’s wild about a service like Google Stadia shutting down is that it’s not like a gaming company just ceasing to make certain console hardware. When Stadia does not exist anymore, neither do the game libraries of its players who purchased hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of titles for use on the service. One of the primary complaints about Stadia was always this “each game sold separately” model. Eventually it did get more and more free games, but not enough, and this problem persisted.

However, Google understands that nuking the service and everyone’s cloud gaming libraries is…bad, so they are offering refunds for:

• All Stadia hardware purchases
• All game purchases
• All add-on purchases made through the Stadia store

I do not believe this includes the actual subscription fees for the service when it was active. I’m also trying to figure out if say, you bought premium currency in Destiny 2 through Stadia and spent it on cross-platform items, if that money would be refunded.

Stadia suffered from two major problems, an overall lackluster game library and the fact that the industry still isn’t ready for a cloud-only gaming service yet. Rivals like Xbox Game Pass or PS Plus may have a cloud element, but they are still fundamentally somewhere you can download and play games onto actual hardware for a more stable experience.

While Stadia lured a good amount of third parties to eventually launch their games on the service, updates and patches often lagged weeks or months behind on those games as the Stadia playerbase was so small it was simply not a priority. Stadia also suffered because Google’s first party game ambitions did not play out, with the tech giant killing those projects and as such, they had close to nothing to offer that Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo or PC didn’t already have. The convenience of playing on the go or in unusual locations had its uses, but they were limited, and the service just never took off, despite cultivating a very small, very intense community of die-hard fans.

Cloud gaming is not going anywhere but Google, one of the biggest corporations in the world, has never had its gaming ambitions seem more cloudy as rivals like Microsoft have been big players in the space for years, and Amazon is still investing in its own games and game-adjacent properties like Twitch.

The end of Stadia is the end of an era. I mean, not a very good era. But an era all the same.

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