Depending on your timezone today is the day. Google Stadia is shutting down. While it might be easy to say that the vast majority of gamers don’t use the service as their primary form of play there is still a load of players that this decision affects. Google Stadia is set to shut down on January 18th, 2023 at 11:59 PM PT/02:59 AM ET (January 19th, 2023)/07:59 AM GMT (January 19th, 2023). Users of the service have been taking to the Stadia subreddit today to share their final moments with the platform some lamenting its demise and others anxiously making jokes about the situation.
The Google Stadia mourning period has been going on for just over a week now since the Destiny 2 servers were shut down on the platform. Thankfully for a lot of multiplayer-centric games, cross-platform progression has already been integrated so players will be able to jump over to other services and platforms with all their content intact.
Although it isn’t just players joining in on the tributes. Rockstar, developers of Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 sent a Stadia-based content creator known as Colour a huge care package full of Red Dead Redemption 2 goodies as they’ve nearly 6,000 hours logged on the Stadia port of Red Dead Redemption 2.
Colour went on in the tweet to thank Rockstar for their support in helping Red Dead Online players on Stadia carry their progression over to other platforms.
And I want to thank you again Rockstar Games for reaching out to me and helping the Stadia community save most of their RDO progress from being lost
Colourful
Alongside this, many players have taken to Twitter to share their memories of Google Stadia. One user noted how influential the service was in meeting new people and how they managed to get 100% on 52 games.
Oddly enough a great number of positive stories have come out as Google Stadia goes into its final hours of live service. It’s clear to see, that while not the biggest service, Stadia had a huge impact on those in its community. While there’ll certainly be a mass migration of Stadia players to new platforms in the coming weeks a lot of memories will be all that’s left of the service after tonight. Whether it’s stories like the ones above or something completely different Stadia players will still look back fondly at the time they spent on the platform as it begins to fade into obscurity.
