After over 3 years in operation Google Stadia was finally shut down on January 18th. This closure is sad for some because it was a very convenient way of playing games. However the service has had it’s detractors since it started and many gaming media outlets and YouTubers saw it’s closure coming right from the outset.

If you try to open Stadia’s website now, you get redirected to https://stadia.google.com/gg/ where it states the service is no longer running.

I personally used Stadia a reasonable amount over the years, but it was never my main way to game. I found the service to be quite laggy at times, however, that’s the nature of cloud gaming right now. Am I sad to see it go? Not really, but I have no regrets paying for Stadia pro as it served it’s purpose. I think that was part of the problem for me, Stadia was nothing special and it never really blew me away. It just wasn’t good enough to replace a physical console next to a television set. In comparison to a good gaming PC, an Xbox Series X or a PS5 the graphics quality wasn’t up to scratch due to compression artifacts and neither was the latency.

Perhaps one day cloud gaming will take over as our primary way to game and maybe Stadia took us a small step closer to that concept but it feels like we’re many years away from it happening, if at all.