Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizens soft media users 2015752, alex310110, Qin Huai Yimeng, South China Daniel Wu's clue delivery! September 30 (Xinhua)-- Google announced on Thursday local time that it would shut down its cloud gaming service Stadia early next year, a move aimed at further cutting costs and saving money.

The Stadia gaming service was launched in 2019 and runs on mobile phones and Chrome browsers. Phil Harriso, vice president of Google, wrote in a blog post: "although Stadia's consumer-facing streaming game is based on strong technology, it did not gain the user appeal we expected and we had to make a difficult decision to start phasing out our streaming service, Stadia. The team will be assigned to other parts of the company."

For Google, Stadia represents an opportunity to make its cloud streaming technology work and achieve a large-scale immersive gaming experience, Harrison said. The Stadia page shows that the Stadia server will be shut down on January 18. The company had hoped that Stadia would compete with other gaming services such as Sony PlayStation Plus Cloud streaming, Amazon Luna and Microsoft Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Shutting down Stadia is the latest cost-cutting move by Sandal Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, who said he wanted to make the company 20 per cent more efficient. Alphabet shares are down 34% this year. July's revenue and profit figures were disappointing. Pichai's efforts to improve efficiency may include cutting product projects and headcount as the company grapples with a series of economic and growth slowdown challenges.

Google recently cancelled the next generation of Pixelbook laptops and cut the budget of its internal incubator Area 120. Google has shut down a long list of projects in the past, including its social network Google+,RSS reader and Internet balloon service Loon.

Almost from the moment it was launched, Stadia faced rumors of shutting down. Last year, Google said it was disbanding its Stadia games and entertainment team, which is responsible for developing original games. At the time, there was widespread speculation that the service might be cut more widely. At the same time, the number of games released on the platform has also decreased.

Joost van Dreunen, a lecturer in gaming at New York University's Stern School of Business, said Google had "never been fully committed to Stadia" and said shutting down Stadia was inevitable.

"from the first announcement, the whole effort is doomed to failure because big technology companies are doing poorly in gaming," he explains. "despite impressive infrastructure and strong financial resources, Stadia's products generally lack personality and will never gain the necessary appeal, and there is no good reason for companies to continue to invest more money."

Google has promised to return to players all Stadia hardware purchased through the Google App Store, as well as all games and additional content purchased at the Stadia Store. The company said it expected to complete most of the refund by mid-January. Players will be able to continue to access their games and play them until January 18 next year.

Google also said it will continue to support other game services and will help developers build and distribute game applications on Google Play and Google Play Games.

Harrison says the technology used for Stadia will not be wasted. "We see potential opportunities to apply this technology to other Google areas, such as YouTube, Google Play and augmented reality (AR) projects, as well as to our industry partners," he wrote.

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