RIP Google Stadia: the latest news on the discontinued cloud gaming service

Phil Harrison, who headed up Google’s now-shuttered cloud gaming service Stadia, is no longer at Google, according to Business Insider. Stadia was officially shut down in January, and Harrison apparently left at around that same time.

Harrison’s quiet departure marks a muted end to his time at the search giant. He joined the company in January 2018, and while he didn’t specify what he was working on at the time, it was easy to guess that he was probably doing something with gaming: Harrison worked at Sony Computer Entertainment (now Sony Interactive Entertainment) for 15 years, was on the advisory board for the cloud gaming service Gaikai, and led Microsoft’s Xbox and Interactive Entertainment business in Europe from 2012 to 2015. And lo and behold, a year after Harrison came to Google, he was onstage introducing Stadia to the world.

Amazon Luna, the cloud gaming service, is expanding to Canada, Germany, and the UK. I certainly didn’t have that on my bingo card.

Remember: Google Stadia is dead as a doornail, and Amazon Luna, the company’s rival cloud gaming service, wasn’t doing much better. It lost a lot of games, and that was after the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority estimated it had less than 5 percent of the cloud gaming market. Oh, also, Amazon’s in the middle of layoffs so brutal that even iconic camera review site DPReview is about to shut its doors.

Two years ago, I wrote a reasonably prescient editorial about how the writing was on the wall for Google’s cloud gaming service Stadia — and how the company was now hoping to sell its white label streaming technology to other companies instead of building out its own Netflix of games.

But it seems that, when Google killed off Stadia, it threw away that technology, too.

Google made a few mistakes with its Stadia cloud gaming service. Maybe more than a few. Okay, it made a lot of promises it didn’t keep and said a lot of things that look pretty laughable in hindsight and totally pulled the rug out from under its indie developers. We did our best to warn you!

And yet, I don’t think Stadia will be remembered poorly now it’s gone — because in the end, Google did right by its customers. Pay attention, rival companies: this is how you shut down a service right.

Google is launching its final Stadia game today and is promising to release a tool next week to enable Bluetooth connections on its Stadia controller. The last Stadia game to launch on the service is Worm Game, a test game that was technically available on Stadia before Stadia launched publicly in November 2019. Developers at Google have decided to release the game just before the streaming service disappears next week.

“Worm Game is a humble title we used to test many of Stadia’s features, starting well before our 2019 public launch, right through 2022,” says Google in its listing for the newly published title. “It won’t win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team spent a LOT of time playing it, and we thought we’d share it with you. Thanks for playing, and for everything.”

Google Stadia, the company’s not-long-for-this-world cloud gaming service, will be shutting down for good on January 18th. (Specifically, January 18th at 11:59PM PT, Google spokesperson Patrick Seybold confirmed to The Verge.) While the shutdown means that you’re about to lose access to all of your titles and saves on Stadia, many publishers have shared ways to bring your purchases and progress to other platforms so you can keep playing your games.

We’ve rounded up some of those options below; if you want to carry over what you can, you might want to start those processes soon. (If I forgot any, email me, and I can add them.)

Ubisoft has started handing out PC versions of games originally purchased on Google Stadia in preparation for Stadia’s shutdown on January 18th, 2023.

Ubisoft previously announced back in September that any Ubisoft titles purchased on the cloud gaming platform would be eligible to transfer over to PC, promising to share “specific details as well as the impact for Ubisoft+ subscribers at a later date.” 9to5Google now reports that this migration process quietly started on Friday, December 16th.

Ahead of the impending shutdown of Google Stadia, Hitman developer IO Interactive has detailed how Stadia players will be able to bring their progress from Hitman — World of Assassination to other platforms. Players will be able to do a one-time transfer, what IO Interactive is calling the Stadia Progress Carryover, to any of the platforms where Hitman 3 is available, including PlayStation, Xbox, and PC.

IO Interactive expects to launch the transfer tool a week before Stadia shuts down on January 18th, but you can prepare now by linking your Stadia account to your IOI Account. If you don’t do this before Google shuts down the Stadia servers, IO Interactive warns that you won’t be able to bring your progress over. You’ll have until February 17th to initiate the transfer.

Google will be issuing refunds for Stadia hardware purchased from the Google Store within two weeks, according to an email sent to customers on Wednesday. That means the refunds should arrive well ahead of the cloud gaming service’s impending January 18th shutdown. Purchases of the Stadia controller, the Founder’s Edition, the Premiere Edition, and Play and Watch with Google TV packages are all eligible for refunds, according to Google’s Stadia shutdown FAQ.

At the time of the shutdown announcement, Google committed to refunding hardware and software purchases, and it began software refunds earlier this month. Once your hardware refund has been issued, you’ll get an email confirmation, Google said in Wednesday’s email. Google expects the “majority” of Stadia refunds to be processed by the January 18th shutdown date.

Ahead of Google Stadia’s imminent January shutdown, Google is starting to process its promised refunds for Stadia games, add-ons, and subscription fees (other than Stadia Pro). Beginning Wednesday, Google will try to refund your transactions to their original form of payment, according to the company’s newly updated Stadia shutdown FAQ.

Watch your email to know if Google has tried to process your refunds. If you made 20 or fewer purchases on the Stadia store, Google says you’ll get an email for each of those transactions. If you’ve made 21 or more purchases, you’ll get a single email that summarizes the refund attempts.

If you played The Elder Scrolls Online using Google’s now-doomed Stadia cloud gaming service, I have some good news. Bethesda is making good on its promise to let people port their ESO accounts over to Windows and Mac, including all their progress, characters, purchased content, achievements, and inventory items.

According to several members of the Stadia subreddit, the company has been sending out emails to players with instructions on how to get the game up and running on their computers, which basically just involves logging into the Elder Scrolls Online site and downloading the game. The company has also posted the information on its website. The one downside is that you won’t be able to transfer your account to the PlayStation or Xbox versions of the game, according to Android Central.

Cyberpunk 2077 players who played the game on Stadia can transfer their save files to PC before Google’s cloud gaming service shuts down, but it’s a little convoluted. To get the files, you have to use Google Takeout, which lets you download your data from Google services and manually bring them over to your PC.

CD Projekt Red has a newly updated support document detailing how it works. Although there are a few steps involved, if you want to carry your progress over, you should do it as soon as you can. Once Stadia shuts down for good on January 18th, 2023, you won’t be able to retrieve that save, CD Projekt Red’s global PR director Radek Grabowski confirmed to The Verge, meaning your progress will be lost forever.

Stadia users weren’t the only people shocked to learn that Google would be shutting down the cloud gaming service; developers making games for the platform were surprised, too.

“I woke up getting ready for my workday, and I see on our Discord private chat for the company that one of my employees sent a message saying ‘is this true?,’ with a link,” Rebecca Ann Heineman, CEO of Olde Skuul, said in an interview with The Verge. “I follow the link and it’s like ‘oh, okay.’” Olde Skuul had planned to launch Luxor Evolved on Stadia Pro on November 1st and was even planning to meet with Google on Friday to discuss the release plan. That obviously isn’t happening now.

Google is shutting down Stadia, its polarizing cloud gaming service, only four weeks after the company’s target audience of me, Makena Kelly, actually started using it. 

When Stadia was announced in 2019, Google pitched it as the future of gaming, providing a more accessible alternative to expensive PC rigs or whatever $500 next-gen console iteration was on the horizon. And when Stadia finally launched, it worked. Sure, features were missing, and connections were shaky, but suddenly I had access to a handful of games that would have previously cost me hundreds of dollars in hardware and controllers to play — a steep investment I wasn’t willing to make for games I may have only thrown on for a few hours.

Stadia may be shutting down next year, but if you’ve purchased Ubisoft titles on the cloud gaming platform, you’ll be able to transfer those purchases to PC at some point in the future, Ubisoft confirmed to The Verge.

“While Stadia will shut down on January 18th, 2023, we’re happy to share that we’re currently working to bring the games you own on Stadia to PC through Ubisoft Connect,” Ubisoft senior corporate communications manager Jessica Roache said in a statement. “We’ll have more to share regarding specific details as well as the impact for Ubisoft+ subscribers at a later date.”

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Google Stadia, but I’m certainly going to miss it now it’s shutting down. While the writing has been on the wall for Stadia pretty much since it launched, I was one of the many (or the few as the joke goes) to be intrigued by this cloud-powered future of gaming. I paid the entry fee for a (mostly) empty stadium, but I enjoyed it anyway.

It hasn’t been easy to like Stadia. The first few months of the service felt like a beta I was paying Google to test. I couldn’t initially connect the Stadia controller wirelessly to a PC or phone; the browser streaming wasn’t as high quality as the Chromecast output; and Google Assistant integration was useless.

Come January, Google will be shutting down its Stadia cloud gaming service. In some ways, the move isn’t much of a surprise — as my colleagues have pointed out, there’s been doubt about whether Google was in it for the long haul with Stadia basically ever since it was announced in March 2019.

If you’ve been listening to what the company said about the service, though, you’d be forgiven for being blindsided. Up until the very end, Google insisted there’s a wonderful future for Stadia, and that players should keep signing up for and using the service, despite rumors that it was about to go bust. Now that Stadia’s officially being shut down, let’s take a look at the times Google promised us this wouldn’t happen.