Some Stadia users have discussed having a final farewell event to the platform in Red Dead Online. Ironically, RDO ceased active development earlier this year.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nOverall, Wann feels that Google underestimated the amount of money it would take to compete with established gaming firms like Microsoft and Sony. However, he was still surprised when Google announced that they were pulling the plug; though he knew Stadia probably wasn’t profitable, he simply thought that the famous company would want to avoid the black eye of a service shutdown.<\/p>\n
Though he’s sad to see his favorite gaming service go away, Wann does feel that the certainty of a hard shutdown is better than the slow guttering that some online games suffer. In fact, he was considering cancelling his Pro subscription due to a lack of support even before the hammer dropped.<\/p>\n
Some early adopters had less patience than Wann, however. At one point, enthusiast Jay Spurgeon owned every game available for Stadia. However, as 2021 wore on and fewer and fewer games came out for the platform, Spurgeon lost faith in Google’s support, and ultimately stopped buying games for Stadia altogether. He plans on using his refund to upgrade his gaming PC in order to play the games that he enjoyed on Stadia on another platform, such as Steam. But regardless, though he feels stung by Google, Spurgeon retains a bright view of cloud gaming in general.<\/p>\n
“I initially had hope for Stadia due to Google\u2019s attachment to it, and the thought that their tech was top of the line, so if anyone was to get high quality game streaming working on a mainstream level, it would be them,” Spurgeon says. “Their handling of the service will make me more skeptical of any new projects or services they plan to release down the line.”<\/p>\n
Ultimately, though Stadia fans are still learning to accept the fate of the streaming service, they also feel that it never quite got a real shot, from both Google and the larger games space. Multiple people I spoke to for this piece cite Stadia’s status as an easy punchline or meme as an unfair label affixed by a community that didn’t even try to see the impressive tech that lay behind the veil of bizarre decisions and mismanagement. Some still aren’t quite over the loss.<\/p>\n
“I felt bitter and incredulous about it,” says Ez, a user who relied on Stadia to play games on his sailboat. Ez points out that many Stadia developers first learned of the platform’s shutdown via online news reports, rather than from Google itself. He feels that the existing cloud gaming services aren’t quite as reliable or impressive as Stadia, and he’s still not sure if he’s going to try to find a replacement. “I think Stadia’s demise will leave an impact on the cloud gaming industry,” he says.<\/p>\n
“Stadia’s engineering team brought a fantastic gaming platform to life,” Wann says. “Google’s management killed it\u2026 I still think cloud gaming is the future. The technology is there. It works.”<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n The products discussed here were independently chosen by our editors.
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