Why Google Shutdown Stadia?

Google has finally decided to pull the plug on its ambitious and quite honestly, great cloud gaming service Stadia. It is, without any doubt, going down as one of the biggest tragedies in the history of video games. The service started back in 2019 and after 3 years of serving the players, Google decided to shut it down once and for all.

It has left a large number of users disappointed and some pretty furious as well, but to make up for it, Google has refunded their subscription amount. It’s not like Stadia wasn’t a good cloud gaming service, I actually had a great time playing some of my favourite console games using Stadia and had a great time.

So why exactly did Google decide to shut it down and is it ever going to be back in some other way? These are some of the questions that a lot of gamers have been asking and we are going to answer them in this article… or at least try to.

What Happened to Stadia?

According to Google’s recent blog post, the company has decided to kill its cloud gaming service Stadia after merely 3 years of being in the gaming market. The reason Google gave for shutting down Stadia is that it wasn’t able to gain as much traction as the company had hoped for and so they have finally decided to pull the plug on it.

And with that, they have also announced to refund the users who have made any purchases from Stadia all the way from the beginning. This includes game purchases, hardware, and any add-ons the users might have bought from Google or the Stadia store.

The refund process will take a few months to complete and is expected to finish sometime in January 2023. And while the decision was tough, it wasn’t really unexpected as Google Stadia was struggling for a while now and it just couldn’t get the attention it deserved compared to its competitors Xbox Game Pass and Playstation Plus. So, don’t worry if you spent your savings to buy RDR 2 account, you will get your money back.

Why did Stadia Fail?

The reason Google gave us for shutting down Stadia is that “it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down Stadia streaming service”. But why exactly did it happen? Why couldn’t Stadia gain the traction that Google think it deserved? Well, there are a lot of reasons that led Stadia to its deathbed.

One of the biggest reasons why I think Stadia failed to make an impact in the gaming industry is that Google made promises that it just couldn’t keep and we exactly know what happens when someone tries to oversell and underdeliver on their promises in the gaming industry.

This has become quite frequent in the gaming industry and that’s a major reason why gamers don’t want to buy something that doesn’t already have all the features upon release. But that’s not even the worst part yet, one of Stadia’s main issues was the fact that the service only functioned with games created particularly for it. Therefore, you couldn’t just use Stadia to play the games you currently owned, purchased from other platforms like Steam or Epic Store. Users had to the Stadia version of that particular game in order to play, which is not really ideal for many.

Stadia Lacked Exclusive Titles

The lack of major exclusives on Stadia, I think also played a major role in leading the service to complete shutdown and Google’s lack of confidence in their own service. And to be honest, Exclusives are super important to get players excited about a platform and almost every popular system or service in gaming history had a noteworthy exclusive at launch.

Instead, Google spent millions of dollars trying to convince the big names of the game development industry to port their titles to Stadia. These included popular titles like RDR 2, Assassin’s Creed, and more on Stadia. Now, that’s not really the problem since these titles would definitely help any major platform to attract more players but there were no exclusives like that, that would excite the players about Stadia.

Conclusion

These are a few of the many reasons why Google decided to shut down Stadia for good. It was still a great service that could actually have worked if Google wanted to but from the very beginning, the company didn’t seem to believe in the project or at least, not enough to see it grow.