Google today officially shut down its Stadia cloud gaming service. The service, which launched in November 2019, was designed to support playing cloud-based games on a variety of devices, including PCs, Chromebooks, Macs, iPhones and iPads.
Reports of Stadia’s mediocre performance among gamers began to emerge in early 2021, shortly after Google decided to close its only in-house Stadia game development studio, Stadia Games and Entertainment (SG&E), just two years old.
Since announcing the shutdown of the service in September 2022, Google has been making good on its promise to refund anyone who purchased the Stadia service during its operation, including games, downloadable content and the control grips provided by the service. Google began processing refunds in November, having previously said it expected to process “most” of them before the platform shut down.
The Stadia control grips are intended to connect directly to the Stadia servers via Wi-Fi, rather than to a host computer or PC, but each control grip includes an unused Bluetooth chip. As a result, Google has provided owners with the tools to enable Bluetooth for Stadia control grips, which will allow them to be used with local devices after the Stadia platform is turned off.
Google last week released Worm Game, one of the last Stadia games, a beta game that marked the arrival of the shutdown.
In the months leading up to the platform’s shutdown, the Stadia store has been closed and all commercial activity on the Stadia platform has ended, including in-game transactions.
