RIP Google Stadia: the latest news on the discontinued cloud gaming service

Google announced on September 29th, 2022, that its Stadia cloud game streaming service will be terminated in late January 2023. You can no longer make purchases through the platform, and notably, Google is offering refunds to gamers for everything that they might have purchased during its three-year existence: controllers, games, and all.

Despite coming to a close (which many predicted given Google’s tendency to kill projects instead of letting them fizzle out), Google arguably succeeded at delivering on its promise of bringing cloud game streaming to a bunch of screens before Microsoft, Sony, and Amazon had formal plans to do the same. It was also novel in the industry for being a platform that didn’t require any hardware buy-in on the side of the user; you could plug a controller you already owned into your computer and get started by launching Google Chrome. Here’s our original review from 2019, for old times’ sake.

We’re taking a look back and a look forward to dig more into Stadia while we still can. You’ll find all posts about the death of Stadia — and possibly the remnants of it that will live on — rounded up in this StoryStream.