Why is Google Stadia shutting down? Real reason explored as the gaming service is set to refund all purchases

Google Stadia was released almost three years ago, in November 2019, in select countries. Soon, the company will be shutting down its cloud-based gaming service and will be refunding all the purchases made by players, including hardware, software, and DLCs.

Players will be able to access their game library and play the games they have bought until January 18, 2023, after which the service will be fully discontinued. More details regarding it are listed in this article.

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Google Stadia players are expected to receive their refunds by mid-January 2023

Google released a blog post today, September 29. In it, they broke the news to the public and asked their customers to make refunds for any hardware purchases made through the Google Store and all add-on content purchases made through the Stadia Store.

Google states that the team behind Stadia will not be laid off, but will rather be transferred to other parts of the company to carry forward their work. Stadia's technology will be applied to other departments such as AR (Augmented Reality), Google Play, YouTube, and more.

The company also plans to make the technology available to its industry partners, which aligns with where they see the future of gaming headed, according to Stadia VP, Phil Harrison.

Google also stated that they remain committed to gaming and will continue to invest in new tools, technologies, and platforms that power the success of developers, industry partners, cloud customers, and creators.

Rumors have been going around about the Google service being discontinued for quite some time now, but the company shut down the rumors on Twitter back in July. Google is known for killing projects after a few years of launch, and with the performance of its gaming service being outperformed by its competitors, it was bound to happen.

The discontinuation was foreshadowed recently when Logitech announced its new cloud gaming handheld device called G Cloud Gaming and mentioned various cloud gaming services, but not Google Stadia. This was highly unexpected given that Stadia is one of the biggest cloud gaming services on the market.

With Xbox Cloud Gaming entering the market with an already established gaming brand, the competition will increase tenfold, which would have made the situation harder for Google.

Moreover, Sony's cloud-gaming service, PlayStation Now, also has a solid playerbase in the market that Google Stadia could not compete against. Lastly, Nvidia GeForce Now also provides a great experience with competitive pricing, low input lag, and a huge library of games, increasing competition for Google.

Google could come back into the gaming market with another form of service, but as the circumstances have unfolded, their cloud gaming service, Google Stadia has failed.