This was a long thing coming, especially since Stadia was pretty much dead on arrival, but Google is officially shutting down its cloud gaming service, Stadia. However, it will remain live until 18 January 2023.

According to the blog post, Google will provide refunds for all Stadia hardware purchased through the Google Store as well as all the games and add-on content purchased from the Stadia store. Most of these refunds are expected to be completed by the middle of January 2023.

So, what’s happening to the existing Stadia infrastructure and employees?

Stadia Vice President and General Manager Phil Harrison said:

The underlying technology platform that powers Stadia has been proven at scale and transcends gaming. We see clear opportunities to apply this technology across other parts of Google like YouTube, Google Play, and our Augmented Reality (AR) efforts — as well as make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed. We remain deeply committed to gaming, and we will continue to invest in new tools, technologies and platforms that power the success of developers, industry partners, cloud customers and creators.

For the Stadia team, building and supporting Stadia from the ground up has been fueled by the same passion for games that our players have. Many of the Stadia team members will be carrying this work forward in other parts of the company. We’re so grateful for the groundbreaking work of the team and we look forward to continuing to have an impact across gaming and other industries using the foundational Stadia streaming technology.

That’s good news because cloud gaming is still in its infancy and it still has unfulfilled potential in the future. Perhaps one day the world will be more prepared to embrace cloud gaming technology, but here’s goodbye to Stadia for now.