Google will shut down Stadia, a troubled gaming platform, and cloud gaming services will continue to be available to players until January 18, 2023. Of course, Stadia's failure is well documented, and while the service's streaming feature was initially praised when it was launche

Google will close Stadia, a troubled gaming platform, and the cloud game service will continue to be available to players until January 18, 2023.

Of course, Stadia's failure is well documented, and while the service's streaming feature was initially praised when it was launched in 2019, the slow, problematic launch means Google failed to capitalize on the interests of its original players. When Stadia announced that it would close its first-party game development studio less than 14 months after its release, the company's failure began to become clearer. It was subsequently reported that the number of monthly active users of the streaming media platform is hundreds of thousands of times.

Although Google continues to insist that Stadia is still "active and good" as 2021 advances, there are reports that the company has "prioritized" the consumer-oriented side of its gaming streaming platform, shifting its focus to a large extent, selling the underlying technology of the service to third parties.

Now, with the third anniversary of Stadia in November approaching, Google has finally stopped operations. “While Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers is built on strong technology,” Stadia Vice President and General Manager Phil Harrison wrote in a new blog post that announced the news, “but it didn’t get the attention of users as we expected, so we made the difficult decision to start shutting down our Stadia streaming service.”

However, while Stadia’s consumer-oriented business will cease in January next year, Harrison said Google will continue to provide game streaming technology to industry partners. He explained: "The underlying technology platforms that support Stadia have proven to be massive and go beyond gaming. We see obvious opportunities to apply this technology in other parts of Google, such as YouTube, Google Play and our augmented reality (AR) efforts and make it available to our industry partners, which is in line with the future of the games we are seeing."

According to today's news, Google said it will refund all Stadia hardware purchased through the Google Store, as well as all games and add-ons purchased through the Stadia Store. "Most" refunds are expected to be completed by mid-January 2023, and more details are available through its Help Center.

Harrison said: “For the Stadia team, building and supporting Stadia from the bottom is driven by the same enthusiasm our players have for gaming. Many members of the Stadia team will continue this work in other departments of the company. We are very grateful for the pioneering work of the team and we look forward to continuing to use the basic Stadia streaming technology to make an impact in gaming and other industries.”