The closure of Stadia, which was made public late last year, caught many people off guard and caused a great deal of dissatisfaction. Stadia has never been a huge hit with gamers, as it was plagued by a myriad of problems, such as connection issues, weak marketing, and a lack of AAA games. Those issues, coupled with poor sales, caused Google to officially pull the plug on its creation.

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Google has specified that Stadia will be permanently shutting down all of its services on January 18 at 11:59 PM PT. Fortunately, some publishers have offered a much-needed lifeline for Stadia users in the form of free save data transfers to other gaming platforms, while other publishers such as Ubisoft are even distributing gamers free PC copies of their purchased Stadia games.

Google will also offer automatic refunds for any purchased games and content from the Stadia Store, other than Stadia Pro subscriptions. All Stadia hardware purchases are also eligible for a refund as long as they were bought from the Google store. By the middle of January 2023, they plan to complete the majority of reimbursements.

The Stadia cloud gaming platform initially appeared to be full of promise when it was first introduced in 2019. Optimistic gamers were hoping that it would usher in a new era, one where video games would become more easily accessible to everyone. After all, cloud gaming can have a ton of advantages, at least on paper. Perhaps the biggest benefit for most people would be no longer needing to buy high-priced computer parts that would also require an upgrade once every few years. Of course, the one massive flaw players saw with the platform was network latency, as cloud gaming requires players to have a stable, high-speed internet connection. Google has long since foreseen this problem, as Stadia’s head of engineering, Majd Bakar, wanted to solve this issue by using predictive technology for creating a revolutionary concept called “negative latency”, that would predict the player’s in-game actions. Unfortunately, this unique idea was never properly implemented.

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Source: TheVerge