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I hadn't even considered this as a consequence of Stadia shutting down. I naively thought, "Well, everyone is getting refunded for everything they spent, so it's fine." Clearly I was wrong. Of course there are folks that have actual game saves that they're heavily invested in on the platform that aren't easily portable.

I feel sorry for this person and hope that Google and its partners like Rockstar work together to create solutions to ensure that people's saves and earned content like game unlocks and achievements aren't lost. I hope that any cloud streaming service that still exists learns from this and ensures that player's data is more portable so in the event that they must shut down, this same problem doesn't crop up again.

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I think Google's biggest flaw in this regard is their own denial of the pattern of shutting things down. If they just acknowledge that's how things go, they can prepare better off-ramps for people who adopted their product. Doing this to your users is a slap in the face because it shows no gratitude for the fact that those people took a chance on your product. They believed in it, and it's not their fault your project failed. Why should they suffer?

But because of Google's hubris, they seem to never admit that failure is an option. Of course they shouldn't say it publicly, but they should have much better internal plans in place for euthanizing products humanely. Failure to do so repeatedly, on a scale like this, reeks of organizational dysfunction, and the absence a moral compass.

I was not a Stadia user, but events like this reinforce my motivation to drop all the Google products I possibly can before they drop me.

Honestly they have the capital to take a position where they publicly state they aren't investing in the product anymore, they'll happily refund people money and work with studios to help users move to other platforms but they'll also keep the lights on for whomever wants to keep using it, unsupported.

Why they completely kill and bury entire products very quickly is sort of bizarre for a company their size.

It’s not healthy to have too many zombie products and staff around your company. Especially at the rate that Google introduces products and then shuts them down, at this point they would have tons staff working on sunsetted products. Besides how incredibly expensive that is, it’s bad for morale.

The question is just how to shut things down in a good way. Honestly it seems like Google has done better than they usually do with this one (refunding everything), but it’s never possible to make everyone happy who depended on your service.

> I was not a Stadia user, but events like this reinforce my motivation to drop all the Google products I possibly can before they drop me.

Ditto. Im literally considering phasing my personal gmail out to a domain that I own...

I transitioned from a Gmail account that is more than 10 years old that I previously used for everything. It was much less of a pain than I expected.

I set up a new inbox with Fastmail on my own domain and set the Gmail to forward everything to the new address. Then I started updating things whenever I received a forwarded message. Over couple of months everything important got gradually sorted out and I cleaned up the rest based on my password manager.

Now I only keep the Gmail around because of the Google Play purchases tied to it plus the possibility that some old colleague or acquaintance may have the old address saved. But if Google shuts it down it isn't a big loss.

Overall, the benefit of more control definitely outweighs the hassle of switching. I would recommend it.

I highly recommend Fastmail. Self hosting is a dream but spam filter monopolies are a nightmare. Opting out of being the product is a good compromise. I pay for email.

Using your own domain name for your emails is probably the most important thing you can do, and everyone should do it. I settled on iCloud+ because I already pay $.99 a month to get more storage. For this price I get support for custom domain names and wildcard fallbacks. It's also configurable natively in the iPhone settings.

At this price it's a pretty good deal + I know I can switch provider anytime.

ex-googler here.

The average Googler hated how many good products were killed. Many want to continue/improve many of the (countless) products that were sunset. I'm sure memegen is on fire as we speak and how Google should be and do better.

Sadly, that's not how it works in a corporate. At least not at Google.

If your boss moves you off the project and hands you new work, that's how it is. You need to spend ~8hrs/day on your next project. Doesn't leave you with any time to work on that project you know is being sunset, and definitely won't help with your Perf and yearly bonus.

Many products have like 2-3 people keeping the lights on for months before eventually the plug is pulled. This rarely happens overnight -- the teams have been moved/offboarded months ago, working on other higher priority stuff.

I don't know how it was for Stadia though -- but I assume it was the same.

Apparently google employees had a meeting telling them Stadia would be shutting down ~45 minutes prior to it being released to the public.

I get the feeling that many were blindsided with the abruptness.

i mean, news as big as that was bound to leak anyway. i dont know how the announcement could have been played any differently.

the deprecation schedule however... different story

No-one is blaming individual engineers, but the company as a whole and the direction taken by upper management. Thanks for confirming!

Back in the day of cordless phones and landlines, I had a phone with a GOOG411 button, which was great until one day Google shut that service down. I’ve never trusted them since

> I was not a Stadia user, but events like this reinforce my motivation to drop all the Google products I possibly can before they drop me.

I currently do AWS infra. This is job security to me, because every time Google shutters another product, a whole cohort of companies chooses AWS over GCP because we all know Google will pull the plug on GCP any day now.

Yes. I am a Technical Advisor for early startups, and I will invariably recommend AWS over Google Cloud to people exactly because of this. I would not trust Google with any small piece of my company. I don't doubt that they CAN do things right, but I am sure they WONT, given their implicit monopoly status. Their arrogant "don't give a shit" attitude about users of their different platforms is amazing.

One just have to see how they treat their actual customers of their Ads platform, and think, if that's how they treat their customers, what can non-customer "lusers" of the other subsidized platforms (including GCS which is being subsidized at this point) expect.

I think it would help with adaptation.

I tried my friend's Stadia. One time he come over connected his controller to my Chromecast and it worked amazingly. I was sold.

The only reason I didn't buy my own, because I have to pay full price for every game and I was afraid what would happen if they shut down the system. If they would have said something like: If you purchase a game from us you will be able to play it for 5 years if not we pay your money back. They did the same in the end, but loosed out a lot of people like me.

It's not just the save file in games like this, it's also all of the virtual currencies users paid real world money for. If someone has played 6k hours on RDR2 they likely bought a LOT of in-game currency and other in-game items. A huge potential for monetary and time loss.

I saw mention that you could get your save games out via Google Takeout, but I don't know if that's verified or if it would even be in a format that's usable to someone.

It is mentioned in the article itself, it also implies that it is not useful for multiplayer saves.

Unfortunately you can't, because Red Dead (((Online))) locks your account on the platform you play, his account on Stadia will simply be erased into oblivion.

>people's saves and earned content like game unlocks and achievements aren't lost.

What does that even mean though? A piece of paper or digital equivalent that lists your in-game achievements? That's worth... a piece of paper or digital equivalent. I mostly don't even get the equivalent for lots of things I spent a lot of time on in real life. I guess I have a diploma somewhere though I don't actually know. (That is at least somewhat verifiable without the original piece of paper.)

I certainly don't expect "achievements" like that to be transferrable other than in a generalized life experiences sort of way.

Well stadia ghost recon players had a save wipe not long ago, at least for them service closure will be painless.

Everyone is NOT getting a refund, only purchases through the Google store are being refunded, if bought hardware from Best Buy etc. you are not.

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