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"
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.
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.
I had a secondary Google account for app publishing, and I was able to switch to that and start another trial there. Not that this information is really any use to you now!
For what it's worth, my experience was pretty bad. Had tons of lag spikes on my 50/5 down/up internet.
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.
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!
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.
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.
However, on the flip side, there are also a good amount of games on Steam that are totally DRM free and Valve wouldn't have to do anything for those games in the event they shut down.
Maybe, just maybe they would release DRM-free Valve games, but that is as far as I could imagine they would go.
The hardware itself was cheap anyways – like $50 for a Chromecast + controller (and even cheaper with deals and bundles), and you can still use both after the service shuts down. It was the $60-80 per game that was the deal breaker.
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.
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.
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.
Even if some people are kind of used to this happening, stating it more obviously might have a negative effect just as well.
And then if you need to and don't want to refund, just keep the service limping along for 5 more years.
If the terms Google had were "we'll sell licenses for your games, but if we shoot down then you have to accept those users as native users", then uses would have been insured against shut-down. I can't see how those terms are worse than if Google were a retailer of those games?
A lot of AAA games are freemium with IAP, surely the acquisition is Cannondale enough that game companies would go for such a deal?
I suppose there wasn't enough upside for Google as people still bought Stadia without any such promise.
But they failed to adequately engage devs or their customers' desires in the first place, so such an arrangement would have been a comparatively impossible licensing and product goal for 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.
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/ceuy4w/comment/eu56...
(That said, props to them for refunding folks.)
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?
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.
But developers aren't getting their time back.