I fell in love with Stadia right as it shut down

Google is shutting down Stadia, its polarizing cloud gaming service, only four weeks after the company’s target audience of me, Makena Kelly, actually started using it.

When Stadia was announced in 2019, Google pitched it as the future of gaming, providing a more accessible alternative to expensive PC rigs or whatever $500 next-gen console iteration was on the horizon. And when Stadia finally launched, it worked. Sure, features were missing, and connections were shaky, but suddenly I had access to a handful of games that would have previously cost me hundreds of dollars in hardware and controllers to play — a steep investment I wasn’t willing to make for games I may have only thrown on for a few hours.

Despite Stadia’s obvious benefits,…

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