Game streaming services, such as GeForce Now, Stadia and Amazon's Luna, haven't been the roaring success the companies behind them had hoped for. One of the pitfalls, that NVIDIA quickly found out, was that the game publishers weren't overly keen on gamers being able to play games they already owned on multiple systems, even if it wasn't on more than one system at once. Multiple services have already come and gone over the years and now it's time for Google to bid farewell to its Stadia service. In its blog post, Google didn't state the exact reasoning behind shutting down the service, beyond it not gaining the kind of traction the company had hoped for.

The good news here is that Google will be refunding all of its Stadia customers, regardless if it's someone that has bought hardware through the Google Store, or bought games or even add-on content for games through the Stadia Store. Google will be refunding all of its customers by the 18th of January 2023 and those using Stadia will continue to have access to all of their content until that date. Google expects its Stadia technology to be used for other services, or potentially be made available to third parties. As to the team behind Stadia, many will apparently carry on working for other departments at Google.