Google’s one of the ambitious products of recent times, Stadia, a digital gaming service, is being shut down. The service, which was launched in 2019, will be shutting down in the coming months, on 18th January 2023 to be precise.

The announcement comes at a time when the company is looking to cut costs. One of the reasons behind this decision is believed to be the lack of traction with the users than what the company had expected.

Google Stadia Game Streaming Service

In a blog post making the announcement, Phil Harrison, Vice President at Google, said, “We’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.” It was launched as an opportunity to put Google’s cloud streaming technology to work and enable gameplay at a massive scale.

The company says that it will refund all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store and all game and add-on content purchases at the Stadia store. The majority of the refunds will be processed by mid-January, and the players will have access to their games library to play till 18th January.

Google adds that it will continue supporting gaming in other areas, along with helping developers build and distribute games on Google Play and Play Games. The technology developed for Stadia may end up being used in other Google services.

The Stadia game streaming service was announced to compete against other gaming services, including Sony’s PlayStation Plus cloud streaming, Amazon’s Luna, and Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently announced that he wants the company to be 20 percent more efficient, and as a part of that, the Mountain View-based giant has been shutting down products. Recently, it was announced that the upcoming Pixel laptop has been canceled, and funding for Area-120 in-house incubator has been cut.

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