There are no guarantees in this world. Nothing lasts forever — especially those things made by Google. In September, the company announced that it would be pulling the plug on its ambitious, but oft-forgotten, cloud gaming service. Stadia’s servers are officially shutting down today, two months shy of its third birthday.
The dream of cloud gaming is long-lived and often fraught. Given all of the strides that have been made by services like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, it seemed like streaming technology might have finally caught up with the dream. But while services like Amazon Luna and Xbox Cloud gaming will live to stream another day, Stadia’s road ends here.
Over the summer, Google took to social media to insist that the service would not be shutting down, only to dramatically reverse course within months.
“[W]hile Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers w...
