The final hours of Google Stadia have arrived

Stadia, Google’s ambitious but ultimately doomed cloud gaming service, is shutting down at the end of today, January 18. Many gamers and developers are bidding the platform farewell, as is Stadia’s social media. As a last gesture, the service rolled out a free-to-play game, Worm Game. It’s been a sad but somewhat heartwarming journey to Stadia’s closure, as the community celebrated its games and their time playing them one last time.

Google announced Stadia’s shutdown last September, with general manager Phil Harrison saying, “It hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected, so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down.” The platform’s history has been brief, but rocky. Its introductory announcement described it as something that would “free players from the limitations of traditional consoles and PCs.” While Stadia will not realize those ambitions, the rest of the games industry has embraced the potential of cloud gaming. Xbox Cloud Gaming, Amazon Luna and Nvidia’s GeForce Now will continue developing the technology.