Google Stadia has officially shut down

Google’s streaming service Stadia has officially been shut down, just over three years after its launch.

The cloud gaming service launched on November 19, 2019, but failed to gather any real momentum, leading to Google‘s announcement in September 2022 that the service would be ending.

That time has now come – the Stadia servers were shut down at 11.59pm PT on Wednesday night (2.59am ET / 7.59am GMT today).

The closure was marked with a final tweet from the official Google Stadia Twitter account, thanking players for taking part.

“To our players and partners, our team, community and fans – thank you, for everything,” it wrote on Wednesday, a few hours before the shutdown.

“As of 11.59pm PT today, we’re signing off from the cloud. Y’all be good to each other, and stay safe out there.”

The tweet was accompanied by the credits from Worm Game, the internal Stadia test game which was made available for players to try for free last week. The credits contain a sizeable list of people who were involved in the Stadia project.

https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1615804298381725696

Announcing the Stadia closure plans in September, platform general manager Phil Harrison admitted that the service hadn’t gained the traction with users that Google expected following its November 2019 launch.

At the time of the closure’s announcement, Google also confirmed that it intended to refund all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store.

According to Google, the underlying technology platform that powers Stadia will be used across other parts of the company like YouTube, Google Play and its Augmented Reality (AR) efforts.