Google To Shut Down Stadia Refund All Purchases

While Stadia will shut down on January 18, 2023, we're happy to share that we're working to bring the games you own on Stadia to PC through Ubisoft Connect. We'll have more to share regarding specific details as well as the impact for Ubisoft+ subscribers at a later date.

That tech will also be made available to Google's industry partners. Sony gave its own streaming service a headstart in 2015 by buying the patents of OnLive -- an early game streaming service -- shortly before the once-promising startup shut down.

It appears that Google didn't tell many developers about the shut-down prior to the public blog post. Destiny 2 makers Bungie tweeted on Thursday about coming up with "a plan of action" in the wake of the announcement. Assassin's Creed developer Ubisoft intends to allow players who've bought its games on Stadia to bring them to PC through its Ubisoft Connect digital distribution service, it said Friday. 

Neill, who runs consumer complaints website Resolver, said 'the game is up' for Sony.
She said the case is particularly important as gaming is the biggest part of the UK's entertainment industry - ahead of TV, video and music. 

Sept 15 (Reuters) - Britain's antitrust watchdog said on Thursday it would launch an in-depth probe into Xbox maker Microsoft's $69-billion purchase of "Call of Duty" maker Activision Blizzard after the tech giant failed to offer remedies to soothe competition concerns.

Explaining the move, Stadia vice president and general manager Phil Harrison noted Google's investments in gaming through its Google Play digital distribution service, its cloud tech and YouTube streaming.
LONDON, Aug 16 (Reuters) - A court in Russia has fined streaming service Twitch 2 million roubles ($33,000) for hosting a short video containing what it calls "fake" information about alleged war crimes in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, Russian news agencies reported on Tuesday.

Cloud gaming service Google Stadia will shut down on Jan. 18, the search giant said in blog post Thursday. Google will refund all Stadia hardware purchased through its Google Store, along with all pkv Games and add-on content purchased from its Stadia store.

Earlier, RIA reported that Telegram messenger was hit with two fines totalling 11 million roubles ($179,000) for refusing to delete channels which allegedly showed how to "sabotage" military vehicles and hosting "unreliable data" about Russia's progress in what it calls a "special military operation" in Ukraine.

Reuters previously reported that Microsoft would pay a $3 billion break-up fee if the deal falls through, according to a source familiar with the matter, suggesting the company was confident of winning antitrust approval.

"A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia," he said in the blog post. "And while Stadia's approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected so we've made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service."

We want to guarantee PlayStation gamers continue to have the highest quality gaming experience, and we appreciate the CMA´s focus on protecting gamers." (Reporting by Amna Karimi and Radhika Anilkumar in Bengaluru and Foo Yun Chee in Brussels; Editing by Vinay Dwivedi and Susan Fenton)

The situation started to resolve the day after launch, but it was a difficult start for the game. In a "known issues" blog post on Oct. 6, a Blizzard community manager posted in Blizzard forums that the game would be undergoing planned downtime for an hour at 3 p.m. PT to fix bugs. Servers will be down again for approximately three hours starting at 6 p.m. PT. "We're conducting significant upgrades to our databases to address player queues. Players won't be able to access the servers during this time," the blog post said.

People using Stadia will still to be able to access to their game libraries, including Pro games if you had an active Pro subscription as of Thursday. In an email sent to players, Google warned that publisher support for games may vary, and it's possible that your gameplay experience may be affected during the shut-down period (suggesting that some games could vanish or lose features early). 

Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said earlier this month the takeover of the videogame publisher maker could hurt competition in gaming consoles, subscription services and cloud gaming if Microsoft refused to give competitors access to Activision's best-selling games.

'And it's nice when I walk down the hallway and I hear, 'Waddup Beast?" For whatever reason, he calls me 'Beast' all the time. I don't think I give off the beast vibe, but and we'll just take it day by day.'

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