Google Stadia shutting down in 2023, Google confirms

Google officially closes its Stadia game streaming platform, announced Phil Harrison, Vice President and General Manager of Stadia in a blog posting published Thursday. It comes three years less since the first cloud-gaming console was launched.

Stadia will close in January 2023.

Harrison explained that Stadia games and hardware buyers will receive a full refund.

“We’re grateful to the dedicated Stadia players that have been with us from the start,” Harrison said. “We will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store. To complete their last play session, players will have full access to their games library. Most refunds should be completed before mid-January 2023. We have more details for players on this process on our Help Center.”

Harrison added that the cloud-streaming technology that powered Stadia could power other Google products, and that Google remains “deeply committed to gaming.”

“We see clear opportunities to apply this technology across other parts of Google like YouTube, Google Play, and our Augmented Reality (AR) efforts — as well as make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed,” Harrison said. “We remain deeply committed to gaming, and we will continue to invest in new tools, technologies and platforms that power the success of developers, industry partners, cloud customers and creators.”

Google Stadia was officially revealed in March 2019, at that year’s Game Developers Conference. In November 2018, the cloud-gaming platform was launched.

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