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Google Stadia will bid farewell on January 18 at 11:59pm PT. The shutdown was first announced in September 2022 as Google decided to shutter its streaming games service since it didn't gain a lot of traction with players. But players on Reddit and Discord are planning to host farewell parties to say their last goodbyes to Stadia.
As reported by PC Gamer, a post on r/Stadia asked what game would be ideal to commemorate Stadia’s last dance. The suggestions included GRID and Sniper Elite, both of which are available on Stadia Pro. Other popular suggestions included flocking to Red Dead Redemption 2 and riding to the desolate town of Armadillo to have a drink at a saloon.
A comment on the post also revealed that the Official Stadia Discord server is hosting a farewell party that anyone is welcome to join. It currently has over 20,000 members but not a lot of them have been active following the shutdown announcement.
Along with the shutdown Google also announced refunds for users. A February 2022 report revealed that the platform had over 750,000 monthly active users, whereas another predicted that an average refund would amount to $900. Considering this, Google will shell out close to $675 million in refunds, and these refunds began processing in the second week of November.
Stadia’s sudden announcement alarmed a lot of players as they were left scrambling to salvage their progress in games, but game companies such as Ubisoft, Bungie, and IO Interactive came to their aid. What was surprising is that these developers found out about the shutdown at the same time as players did.
Despite the exit of a platform like Stadia, a report predicted that the cloud gaming market will continue to grow.Cloud gaming platforms and services include the likes of Amazon Luna, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Nvidia GeForce Now, all of which will want to grab a chunk of Stadia's market share, while Netflix is reportedly planning its own cloud gaming service.