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Comment by Sebb767 | Hacker News Reader

> I really can't stand how Google has handled the whole stadia thing.

Why? It's not great that they're shutting it down, but refunding all purchases is by far not the worst way to handle this.

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I think it's the best way to handle shutting it down but I'm talking about the entire product lifecycle: the technical choices made during development, the decision to launch, the business relationship handling, and post launch execution, marketing and comms. I am not claiming that every aspect of stadia has been a failure, and the full refunds for everyone (except developers lol) is one of the few things that is going well.

Ironically, I think that if they’d made that a policy at the beginning the service would have had a much better chance of succeeding. So much of the initial coverage was dominated by people balking at paying full price for games they couldn’t use when Google killed it - saying that they’d give you Steam/Epic/GOG codes or something would have been a good way to completely avoid that and start rebuilding their corporate reputation.

Yup, I never touched Stadia for this exact reason. I'd have been curious otherwise especially since I travelled quite a bit for work before covid (so no access to my gaming pc) but assuming I'd lose any money spent when Google inevitably cancels the service prevented me from even trying it.

It’s wild thinking how they missed the boat during a time when billions of people were looking for online entertainment and GPUs were hard to get. They could have done some kind of pandemic promo if they didn’t want to commit to friendlier terms forever.

Not quite “all” purchases. Pro subs and 3rd party purchases won’t be refunded,

There's not just users involved, see headline story.

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