Google Stadia Is Officially Toast After Just Three Years Of Attempting Cloud Gaming Service

Google has officially ended its ill-fated Stadia experiment after only three years in the gaming business.

Earlier today, Stadia vice president and GM Phil Harrison announced in a blog post that Google would discontinue the cloud gaming service on January 18th, 2023. All hardware, games and DLC will be refunded to Stadia owners.

"While Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service," Harrison wrote.

Stadia launched in 2019 but floundered almost immediately, offering consumers little in the way of reasons why they should invest in it instead of a console from Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo. The company attempted to salvage the Stadia by turning it into a B2B service earlier this year, but it seems those efforts weren't enough to save the doomed platform.

The news that Stadia's coffin had gotten its final nail hardly surprised many gamers, who tempered their schadenfreude with appreciation that Google was refunding all purchases made for Stadia — a common critique of the platform for years that speculated users would lose out on anything they'd purchased if Stadia ever went belly-up.

While gaming historians can debate if Google was ever onto something with Stadia or if the concept of an in-browser gaming service was doomed from the start, one thing is for certain: Google Stadia was unquestionably one of the game services of all time.