During COVID-19 lockdowns, gaming is the go-to choice for many. People who don’t have a lot of time to play games have more time to play games. People who had never played games before the pandemic will start playing games and wanting to play games. Those who have nothing to do at home can fill the void by playing games, after all, which is a cheaper form of entertainment. 

However, as people began to return to normal life since they learned more about the pandemic, demand for games began to slow. In addition, high prices and consumer spending have forced many players to cut back on entertainment and games.

While the upcoming shutdown of Stadia is one of the cases, on September 29, Google said its Stadia cloud gaming service would officially shut down on January 18, 2023. 

Phil Harrison, Stadia’s vice president, and the general manager wrote on Thursday in a blog post that Google’s Stadia cloud service will shut down on January 8th after it debuted nearly three years due to its failure to catch on with enough gamers. He said that although Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.

Although it was expected, Google’s sudden announcement that it was shutting down Stadia, its cloud gaming service, came as a surprise.

The life of Stadia is a flash in the pan

In March 2019, Google officially launched its Stadia Cloud gaming service, which allows users to play games anywhere, anytime, without the help of high-end hardware. To promote Stadia, Google reached out to multiple game publishers and secured dozens of games for the Stadia Cloud gaming platform, including hits like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Red Dead Redemption 2.

However, the development of the cloud gaming platform has not been smooth.

Stadia has a very high dependency on the network environment, and there are not many players who can meet this demand. As a result, it was not accepted by the majority of gamers once it started operating, and of course, it was not able to compete with SONY, Microsoft, and Nintendo, which had a large number of gamers.

Stadia, which was struggling to make ends meet, went down faster than people thought, due to bad experiences with technical issues and disputes over its payment model.

According to Forbes, Stadia leaders reportedly aimed to have 1 million monthly active Stadia users by the end of 2020, but it’s said to have missed that target by approximately 25%.

With Stadia not meeting user and revenue targets and its high costs, Google was quick to make changes to its gaming business. Starting in 2021, Stadia became increasingly invisible inside Google. Its game development studio Stadia Games & Entertainment announced its closure in early 2021, with head Jade Raymond also announcing her departure. All this shows that Google has given up on developing exclusive content for Stadia, and third-party games like The Quarry, which were originally intended to be exclusive to Stadia, are now available on other platforms. This left Google with no choice but to focus on its gaming platform, but Stadia didn’t do well because it had so few players.

Although Google said as recently as July that it would not close its Stadia Cloud gaming platform, Google’s financial performance did not give them a chance to continue. Google’s revenue fell sharply in the second quarter, which led Google to cut costs, and the unprofitable Stadia was abandoned.

Currently, Google has no plans on how it will handle refunds, but it will notify affected users via email and update its support page in the near future

Google has promised that all hardware and software purchased through the Google Play Store will be refunded, and that purchased services will remain available until the service is shut down.

In the wake of the incident, game maker Ubisoft announced that it is stepping up support for game transfer by helping players transfer Ubisoft games purchased on Stadia to PCS.

“Even though Stadia will be shutting down on January 18, 2023, we’re happy to report that we’re currently working on bringing the games you own on Stadia to PC via Ubisoft Connection,” Jessica Roach, senior corporate communications manager at Ubisoft said.

What is the future of cloud gaming

Stadia, which has been the subject of a lot of discussion in gaming circles, has kept only its cloud gaming technology, and Google has said it will apply it to other areas.

Harrison says that Google sees opportunities to apply Stadia’s technology to other parts of Google, like YouTube, Google Play, and its AR efforts, and the company also plans to “make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed”.

However, the shutdown of Stadia is not the end of cloud gaming service.  

According to the data collected by CouponBirds, the global cloud gaming market size is expected to reach US $3.24 billion by 2022, growing to US $40.11 billion by 2029, at a CAGR of 43.6% over the forecast period. Some of the major players in cloud gaming services see great growth. In April, Microsoft announced that more than 10 million people were now playing Cloud games through Xbox Cloud Gaming. Nvidia’s GeForce Now game streaming service now has more than 20 million registered users, up from just over 1 million two years ago. 

Admittedly, cloud gaming is an advanced technology that allows players to get rid of the constraints of hardware and play games anytime and anywhere. With the help of cloud gaming technology, even an outdated mobile phone can also be played with the help of the network to play high-quality large-scale games. Although the technology is still immature and will be limited by the Internet, it is predictable that as technology continues to advance, cloud gaming will continue to evolve and become an important or dominant part of the gaming market. 

Despite Stadia’s shutdown, the evolution of cloud gaming platforms is just beginning, and the future of these cloud gaming platforms will continue to be exciting.