TECH NEWS – Google Stadia is coming to an end. The company has just revealed exactly when the streaming service will finally exit the gaming world.

A few months ago, Google announced that the Stadia game streaming service would be discontinued. Now the exact date of the shutdown has been revealed. Unfortunately, the demise of Google Stadia means that gamers will no longer have access to their purchased content on that platform.

The closure of Stadia, which was announced late last year, caught many people by surprise and caused quite a stir.

It was never a big hit with players, as a myriad of problems plagued it. For example, connection problems, lame marketing and a lack of AAA games. These problems and poor sales led Google to shut down the service officially.

Google has clarified that Stadia will permanently shut down all its services at 23:59 am PT on 18 January. Fortunately, some publishers have offered Stadia users a much-needed lifeline. In the form of free backup data transfers to other gaming platforms. Other publishers, such as Ubisoft, are even giving away free PC copies of purchased Stadia games to players.

Google also offers automatic refunds for games and content purchased from the Stadia Store, except for Stadia Pro subscriptions. All Stadia hardware purchases are also eligible for a refund if bought from the Google Store. They plan to complete the majority of refunds by the end of January 2023.

The Stadia cloud-based gaming platform initially looked promising when it was unveiled in 2019. Optimistic gamers hoped it would usher in a new era. One in which video games would become more accessible to all. After all, cloud gaming could bring many benefits, at least on paper. Perhaps the most significant benefit for most people would be to stop having to buy expensive computer parts that need to be updated once every few years.

Unfortunately, for all its unique ideas and innovative solutions, Stadia has never been able to deliver on its grand plans and has failed to live up to its promise.

Even though Stadia has succumbed to its own problems, gamers still have access to several cloud-based gaming platforms. These include Amazon Luna, NVIDIA GeForce NOW and Xbox Cloud Gaming. However, it is not yet clear whether cloud gaming will be the future of gaming.

Source: TheVerge