Stadia Fans Are Still Mourning The Death Of Their Favorite Service

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Stadia Fans Are Still Mourning

  • Stadia user CloudKnight was eating breakfast at Huddle House when a devastating notification flashed on his phone: Google announced that the streaming service Stadia would die in just a few short months.

 

  • Like a lot of Stadia fans, CloudKnight was taken aback by the news. Just a few weeks earlier, Google had said that Stadia would expand into Mexico, as well as confirming a slate of games coming to the service in the coming months. He took that as assurance that the tech giant was committed to the cause, at least in the short-term.

 

  • “I was very surprised,” he says. “I didn’t expect it at all. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing, but the main one is definitely disappointment.”

Stadia

  • Google Stadia’s prescribed shutdown day of January 18, 2023 continues to inch ever closer, and fans have adopted different strategies to deal with their negative emotions. Some continue to play games on the service, determined to enjoy every minute they can until the final sunset. Others have abandoned their boxes entirely, lobbying Google to make the popular Stadia controller more PC-gaming friendly as a future-proofing measure.
  • Stadia’s official Discord reflects this strange interim period. It’s entered a sort of hazy afterlife, with early disbelief and rage simmering down into wide-ranging discussions of modern gaming and alternatives to Stadia.

 

  • Some users have expressed a desire to organize farewell events for the service’s more popular games, like Bomberman R and Red Dead Online. Others, like CloudKnight, have already moved on to other cloud gaming services, such as Amazon Luna.

 

  • Though he looks back on his experience with Google’s platform with bittersweet feelings, he ultimately feels that the future of cloud gaming is assured, with or without Stadia.
  • “I don’t think cloud gaming is going to be affected at all,” he says. “Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon are all investing pretty heavily into the tech in their own ways…Cloud gaming is a niche market now, but it seems like it’s only going to grow over the coming years.”

  • The Stadia community is a bizarre mixture. While there are some who are among the most difficult of hardcore gamers that have to have every console in their collection, others are gamers who aren’t as active and have to manage their gaming time with a demanding job or parental responsibility. Stadia let them discover their passion for gaming once more. Stadia users Craig Wann first became aware of Stadia through its Project Stream beta in 2018. Being a business owner who had children to take care of, Wann was attracted to the character’s pick-up-and-play features that he frequently chose over his gaming computer. Also, he used Stadia to engage in games alongside his children and eventually built up an extensive library of more than 200 games.
  • “Stadia’s technology was flawless,” Wann says. “It just worked. I was able to grab my controller and start playing the game in mere just a few seconds. The streaming quality was unbeatable and I never experienced delays, even when using WiFi…Stadia Pro exposed me to games I’d never played without it, like Valkyria Chronicles and Farming Simulator.”
  • Google’s decision to pay back each Stadia purchase completely has eased the blow to early users, many of whom have deposited several hundred dollars of money into Stadia in the last three years. Although the money can be helpful in the transfer of game saves and digital items from Stadia isn’t always easy. Google Takeout lets users claim their saved data from any game they like However, users have had mixed, game-specific results in the transfer of those saved saves onto other platforms.
  • A lot of industry analysts consider the closing of Stadia’s own studios in the early 2021s as a pivotal event in the history of the service and Stadia’s most ardent fans came to similar conclusions. Wann considered it a confirmation that Google did not intend to continue supporting the service in the future. However, he continued to use his Stadia Pro service until they announced its end of service a little over an year after.