6 ms·

Ironically, I bet if that Stadia would've done much better if it had launched with the promise of "if we do shut it down, we'll refund all your purchases"

• dicomdan 4y ago
  They are refunding purchases to users. But developers aren't getting their time back.
• josefresco 4y ago
  Yes! I timidly used the service knowing that Google might kill it. If they promised me a refund I would have probably spent a couple hundred dollars on content, controllers and a pro membership.
  • jamiek88 4y ago
    Yes it was a decent investment to get started, too much for a whim. I seriously thought about it but ended up scoring an Xbox and game pass and my main reason was I have to buy the games at full price for Stadia and google will deffo shut it down sooner rather than later so too risky. Game pass is amazing for someone who isn’t a hardcore call of duty type gamer! I’ve been away from gaming since playing tiger woods on the OG Xbox so being able to play so many different types of games is awesome. I like forza horizons!
    • sylens 4y ago
      Google's mistake was not choosing to go with a Game Pass type model - but then again, they didn't have the content as they have had to work to get each of the games offered running on Linux. It's why they have had to pay millions to developers to make Stadia versions available.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • sbarre 4y ago
    Just for clarity, they are refunding hardware and software purchases but not membership fees.
  • iLoveOncall 4y ago
    How would Stadia shutting down justify you not getting a pro membership? It's something you pay monthly anyway, it's not like you get less of your money worth if they close the service 2 years after your subscription was used, unlike hardware and games.
• dilap 4y ago
  That's a promise you can only keep if almost no one buys anything, though. :-)
  • lolinder 4y ago
    If Stadia had grown to the scale where Google would have had a hard time refunding all purchases, odds are they wouldn't have felt the need to shut it down.
    • moffkalast 4y ago
      Problem is though, if they ever decided to shut down they'd have to repay the entire amount of revenue they've made and more.
      • foepys 4y ago
        Nobody would have prevented them from changing the ToS after a few years to not refund new purchases after date X. It would have been a bad signal but if the platform was successful people wouldn't really mind.
        • kevincox 4y ago
          If you put it in from the start it wouldn't be an issue. Or even just guarantee refunds from purchases in the past 3 years. So there is a rolling window and you can lessen the impact but closing the store and continuing operating the platform for 1-2 years.
        • vineyardmike 4y ago
          “We’ll refund the purchases made while the service was in public beta”
      • jedberg 4y ago
        Presumably it would be something like "we will refund any purchase if we shut down before 2024" or something like that.
• paxys 4y ago
  I would 100% have signed up and bought games if I was assured that I'd get my money back if the service was shut down in under, say, 3 years.
  • dmoy 4y ago
    That's kinda why I keep buying on steam, because they (at least ostensibly) will un-DRM games for download if they ever shut down
    • mey 4y ago
      My steam account is 18 years old. I can still easily download Braid, a game released in 2009, and I apparently played in 2014, install it on my Steam Deck and be playing it again in ten minutes. Considering it has cloud save support, there is a not small chance that my saves may even be intact. It's that endurance in the platform that has me coming back. I have faith that Valve as a company is in it for the long haul to act as a game store platform and honor my digital purchases. It's allowed me to put several thousand dollars into them.
      • dham 4y ago
        It's really the endurance of Windows more than anything. I can play stuff on Windows 11 mostly the same as I did on Windows XP. I can't play any game from Steam on Mac more than a few years old.
        • zerocrates 4y ago
          Proton offers some of this effect also: Wine/Proton is pretty good at playing lots of old Windows stuff, in some cases better than actual Windows is.
        • imran0 4y ago
          It's fascinating that I can just click and run a game compiled in 1996 (WINQUAKE) in Windows 11; but my ubuntu installation breaks after not touching it for two months.
• vesinisa 4y ago
  Yeah actually, same here. When Stadia launched I really liked it. The subscription was free for like 3 months. I've not owned a gaming PC in years, but really enjoyed playing Serious Sam and almost completed it. When the free period ended I could've purchased few of the games I most liked but ultimately decided against it because I knew by that time it was inevitably going to be shut down so giving Google any money was a fool's errand.
• nailer 4y ago
  BTW when Cyberpunk was released and didn't work, and PS Store / Steam / XBox gave refunds, Stadia was the only platform that refused refunds.
  • zorked 4y ago
    It worked well in Stadia.
    • TillE 4y ago
      Cyberpunk was riddled with actual game-breaking bugs on release, it wasn't just graphical glitches and poor performance.
• Macha 4y ago
  "and let you export your saved games"
• ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  A lifecycle policy is a truly underrated component of a good services and software business, and I wish more people both understood that, and more companies had them. When I buy pretty much any Microsoft product, I can go on their lifecycle policy page and see a date, often five to ten years out, when they commit to continue supporting/securing the product through. If I get more than that, great, but there's a commitment Microsoft is held to up front. Google cannot make that commitment because Google cannot commit to anything. But it's a large enough company it could afford to do it and eat the cost when it was a bad call. The reason they won't is because Google doesn't view customers as people or partners they need to value.
• tshaddox 4y ago
  Funny story. Two years ago they gave away "Stadia Premiere Edition" kits for free, which was a Chromecast Ultra and a Stadia controller which I believe retailed for USD 100. I wasn't particularly interested, but I figured it would be worth a try. But when I got the hardware I tried signing up and realized that apparently I had signed up for the Stadia free trial 6 months earlier. I vaguely remember trying for literally a few minutes on my laptop. This means that the $100 of promotional hardware they sent me is completely useless for its intended purpose. It's genuinely sad that some manager or team went to all the trouble of getting the budget for this hardware promotion, but couldn't or didn't reset the free trial for the Google accounts of the recipients. But it might be a clear sign of the general level of competence with which the entire Stadia project was executed. On the bright side, the Chromecast is still quite useful, although I'm not personally using it and haven't found someone to give mine to. Last I checked there wasn't any way to use the Stadia controller for anything, but I wouldn't be surprised if people could figure out how to "jailbreak" it and make it useful.
  • icelancer 4y ago
    It works over its standard USB-C interface with a computer. I got the same deal you did and use my Stadia controller with ROMs on my laptop when traveling. Works great. Excellent controller, too. The wireless interface is actually WiFi and some form of Bluetooth and not easily jailbroken last time I checked.
    • tshaddox 4y ago
      That's good to know. I think the WiFi and/or Bluetooth was what I had looked for and found nothing. I'd want to use it for games on my Apple TV or Nintendo Switch.
    • Flameancer 4y ago
      Yea they should definitely open source the firmware or at least do one last update to make it Bluetooth compatible. I as well got the promo deal.
    • inerte 4y ago
• pavon 4y ago
  Or at least use a business model that didn't require your customers to put complete trust in the fact that you wouldn't shutdown, when you have a reputation for killing projects. I'm not a hardcore gamer and have a pretty weak desktop by gaming standards. If this was setup like an all-you-can-eat subscription, or an al-carte rental, I would have jumped on it in a heartbeat, and if it went away, oh well, I got what I paid for. But the fact that that you had to "purchase" individual games made it a complete non-starter for me. If I purchase something, I want to actually own it, forever, not have temporary access to it at the whim of the publisher/service. I don't trust any online service to stay active indefinitely, and Google doubly so.
  • odessacubbage 4y ago
    what's also important here is that people are very invested in the ownership of their games, probably more so than they are of their films/their music. 'your games' are intrinsically tied to your saves in those games; your characters, your items, all the bullshit grinding you did once and never want to have to do ever again. in a very real sense, "You" are in your games in a way that isn't true of movies or music or the other formats of media that have been relinquished to the cloud.
• permo-w 4y ago
  can you imagine marketing or finance allowing a statement like that through?
• aequitas 4y ago
  I don't remember exactly, but I believe this was promised in some sense when I decided to get on board a year or 2 ago. At the time you got a free Chromecast + Controller when buying Cyberpunk which was also a pretty good deal to pass by.
  • dpkirchner 4y ago
    Someone asked Stadia devs or reps on Reddit if users would have access to purchases games if the service shut down, back when Stadia was announced, and the response was not a "no" but definitely wasn't a "yes". https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/ceuy4w/comment/eu56yhf/?context=8&depth=9 https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/ceuy4w/comment/eu56... (That said, props to them for refunding folks.)
    • chihuahua 4y ago
      That the Stadia dev's response on Reddit is pure nonsense, basically just saying that 1. we're committed to supporting this for years to come 2. you can download your game metadata (saved games) LOL, what are people supposed to do with their game metadata now that Stadia is being shut down? Look at it in a hex editor?
      • Dylan16807 4y ago
        > LOL, what are people supposed to do with their game metadata now that Stadia is being shut down? Look at it in a hex editor? Take your full price refund and rebuy the game at half price. If you don't have the hardware for it, it's much cheaper now than it was three years ago, or you could use geforce now.
• schnevets 4y ago
  The question is: Would that be more cost-effective than just outright buying Ubisoft or a similar-sized publisher so your device has some content?
• intrasight 4y ago
  "Google Stadia is a cloud gaming service whereby games can be purchased and played, but don't have to be downloaded to a console or PC." This was a doomed business model because it blurred subscription and purchase. If it was subscription, there should have been no purchases (hardware or software) necessary. There are millions of people - myself included - who would pay for a subscription game service. Stadia was not that service.
  • yencabulator 4y ago
    Stadia had both. Stadia Pro was a subscription that gave you access to a few new games every month, and you could buy (licenses to play) games.
    • intrasight 4y ago
      Had both means blurred - therefore doomed
    • anonymousab 4y ago
      "stadia" in the public's mind, and how it was primarily communicated and advertised, was a subscription streaming service where you also had to pay full price for games that could only be used on their service and would go away with it. That's not the "Netflix for games" that it needed to be and stadia pro's limited selection was nowhere near adequate either. As a result, they set themselves up with the most unappealing business model possible for consumers.
    • hot_gril 4y ago
      It was confusing marketing. I didn't know what it was until I actually went through with trying it, and even then the game license ownership was unclear to me. It was weird how you'd buy a game upfront at regular price then not pay for streaming it later, UNLESS you paid monthly for Stadia Pro for the ability to stream at higher quality, which also came with some free games and hardware (?), AND there was a free trial version of it (which evidently deleted your free games when it expired). I assume at this point that the license for the one game I bought was only good for Stadia, and I'm being refunded for it. That's good, cause Far Cry 5 got boring fast.
• crazygringo 4y ago
  Not with developers though. Consumers get refunded, game developers don't get anything back.
• matrix_overload 4y ago
  That could have put them to unlimited risk. Let's assume they currently got $1M in revenue and spent $500K on maintenance. They can either refund everyone (buying goodwill for $500K) or book a $500K profit and piss people off. Currently, the estimated value of the goodwill is above $500K, so they are proceeding with a refund. But it could have been different. They could have got $10M in revenue, then most users would have moved to competing platforms, while still playing previously purchased games on Stadia. This could have left them with a choice between $1M/year running costs to keep the lights on vs. $10M to purchase goodwill that is only worth $1M.
  • imron 4y ago
    > vs. $10M to purchase goodwill that is only worth $1M. The goodwill is worth far more than $1M because it affects Google's entire reputation. They already have a reputation of shutting things down. How many people will look at this, and start considering whether or not they should move off GCP? How many people will not sign up for their next big new product because of things like this? Which will ironically be likely for that product failing and being shut down (like Stadia). It's a vicious cycle, and Google is going to have a hard time breaking it.
• appleflaxen 4y ago
  That is incredibly funny, and incredibly apt.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• anonymousab 4y ago
  They straight up incompetently dodged the question whenever it came up and tried to turn it into some patronizing and belittling "we understand that you're scared of the future" statement every single time. They deserved to fail on that point alone. Either promise refunds or promise none; either way you're signaling a form of confidence in your product and making the expectations clear to your users. Refusing to answer on that point made it clear where their confidence was and how weasely they felt they needed to be to sell their product.
• hot_gril 4y ago
  I'll bet they would've failed anyway then had to refund even more money. Extra cynical view: Maybe they were afraid of this from the beginning, and that's why they didn't tell anyone.