The Google Stadia shut down rumor has been circulating all over social media, and Google Stadia has decided to clarify that this in fact is only a rumor and that they have no intention of killing off Stadia any time soon.
Is Stadia Being Killed by Google?
Google Stadia has been around since 2019, but as most know, Google has a bit of a commitment issue when it comes to applications. Stadia is one of the platforms that consumers were concerned about, as Google has made a habit of killing off services that people end up becoming quite fond of. In recent Tweets, it was stated that Google held a conference in California, where they discussed the killing off of the Stadia service, but that they did not give an exact date as to when this would occur. The claim also said that the users would get a 30-60 day notice prior to the shutdown and that once the announcement has been made, the final month of service would come free of charge.
At that point, it seemed that Stadia was getting ready to lay down on its death bed, but Google stepped up with a Tweet of their own, stating that they currently have no intention of shutting Stadia down and that they are actually working on bringing more games to the platform in the coming future. While this sounds hopeful, that doesn't mean that the service is completely safe, it just means that it is safe for now.
Since the start of Stadia, it has been rather volatile. Just 18 months after its launch, Google decided to shut down the service's first-party studio in Montreal and Los Angeles, completely killing off the first-party development idea. They decided to focus more on games from third-party devs, which cost about 150 people their jobs at the company.
This wouldn't be the first time Google has sent a service to the graveyard, much like they did with G suite legacy, a free tier offering some of the services included in Google's productivity suite, which was over 15 years old at the time of shutdown. There is even a site dedicated to the apps and services Google has killed off, which you can see here. The average age of a Google application or program is four years, and thus a site was created to countdown to the four-year count after Stadia launched.
One of the main issues that players have with Stadia is the lack of AAA content. Google has noticed that gamers have called this a "problem" and it has made them somewhat shy away from wanting to keep this as a consumer service. More so, they completely reworked what Stadia brought to the table, stating that it may offer more cloud gaming services in the future. That was made apparent when the underlying tech to Stadia evolved into a cloud product that they named "Immersive Stream for Games".
Had The Quarry actually been a Stadia exclusive as it seemed to have been planned to be, it could have given the service a much-needed boost. Though, the owner of 2K games never actually confirmed that The Quarry was actually going to be a Stadia exclusive, they did say that Supermassive was looking for a publisher for the game as it came into the final stretch.
As of now, there is no information that Stadia is going to be killed off, but that also doesn't mean it will be around forever either, as we know Google may just turn the tides on the product once more.
