Google said it will terminate services for Stadia, its troubled cloud gaming service, after it failed to gain traction with players almost three years after its launch.<\/p>\n
Stadia was an attempt from Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google to take on the video game console giants with a platform of its own.<\/p>\n
Unlike traditional consoles, Stadia allowed users to play games on devices such as Android phones and Chromecast apps for TV, by funneling data directly from Google\u2019s server clusters. Its subscription cost $10 a month.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile Stadia\u2019s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn\u2019t gained the traction with users that we expected,\u201d Phil Harrison, Stadia vice president and general manager,\u00a0wrote<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0in a blog post on Thursday.<\/p>\n \u201cSo we\u2019ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.\u201d<\/p>\n Players will be able to access their games library and play through Jan. 18. Google will refund Stadia hardware purchases, games and add-on content made through the Google Store, Harrison said.<\/p>\n Google invested generously in Stadia in an effort to reach well beyond the audience of traditional gamers or those who couldn\u2019t afford a pricey Xbox or PlayStation console.<\/p>\n It shelled out tens of millions of dollars to get games like\u00a0Red Dead Redemption 2\u00a0<\/em>on the platform, Bloomberg has reported.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Stadia debuted in November 2019 with popular third-party franchises including\u00a0Destiny 2<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Assassin\u2019s Creed Odyssey<\/em>.<\/p>\n But Google\u2019s ultimate goal was to pack Stadia with original content and the company hired hundreds of game developers from Montreal and Los Angeles.<\/p>\n They didn\u2019t have long to ramp up before Google shuttered its in-house game development in early 2021.<\/p>\n People familiar with the studio said at the time that the rule-bound tech giant\u00a0struggled<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0to foster an environment nurturing to video game development, which is interdisciplinary and can be chaotic.<\/p>\n The impact of Covid-19 spurred a hiring freeze at Google, which presented challenges for staffing up the division.<\/p>\n Gamers also chafed at the idea that games they purchased for $60 a piece didn\u2019t feel like they belonged to them, since they were stored in the cloud \u2014 a concern validated by Thursday\u2019s shutdown notice.<\/p>\n Accustomed to owning their own hardware, some gamers felt like Stadia appeared too jarring of a shift.<\/p>\n The service missed its sales targets on controllers and monthly active users by hundreds of thousands, Bloomberg has reported.<\/p>\n With the exit of Stadia, that leaves Amazon.com Inc.\u2019s Luna, Microsoft Corp.\u2019s xCloud and Nvidia Corp.\u2019s GeForce Now to chart the future of cloud gaming.<\/p>\n Google said it will terminate services for Stadia, its troubled cloud gaming service, after it failed to gain traction with players almost three years after its launch.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":462611,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[32030,56574,77780,59401],"class_list":["post-462609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming","tag-alphabet","tag-cloud-gaming","tag-game-streaming-services","tag-google-stadia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462609"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/462611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Now read: Discord voice chat officially launches on Xbox<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"