Google gives up on Stadia, will offer refunds on games and hardware

Quoting: CatKillerThey were all ported to Linux

How can we know this for sure? Is there actual evidence for this, or is it just implied, assumed, whispered about? Cause I've never seen any actual evidence of it, and definitely some indication to the contrary (there was something about borderlands3 I believe). Personally I just assume they were all mostly protoned. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, and for the results to end up on steam though.

As Stadia being Linux based didn't yield the hoped for increase in (released) native versions, it's not much of a loss in my book tbh. But i must say - it's a nice move to refund everything!

Sad, they were pushing Vulkan.

Quoting: BlackBloodRum

Quoting: Klaas

Quoting: kuhpunktheld seminars

If I recall correctly, they claimed that they were cleverer than the wine developers because they needed so much time.


Anyhow, I'm glad that this scheme is dead.

Sadly, a lot of the large proprietary businesses think like this. It's not overly uncommon for a large business to claim "our product is much better than any free version you can get, it works better yadda yadda".

When they do release the product it can be either:
- Very limited in features
- Buggy / has lots of problems
- Just generally not very good
- Sometimes, rarely, actually a good product



(I'm biased...)

The age old "how hard can it be". Well quite often: much.

I'm actually happy Stadia is dead... The whole concept of streaming games is inherently discriminatory to the majority of the world, which doesn't have good Internet connection. At least 2 entire continents are out of this business because of this.

Also, the idea of paying for a videogame that after some time is not going to be available... nope, not for me. That's another reason why I don't like Netflix and all these streaming services. I want to HAVE what I pay for, locally.

Hopefully, the business of truly owning what you pay for is coming back in the future.

I told u so!

Btw @Liam you might want to add a notice that you can rescue most of the savegames via Google takeout: takeout.google.com

Some savegames will be incompatible because (Stadia exclusive) Linux versions vs. Windows builds, but most will probably work fine.

"Google pull the plug on Stadia—no one surprised, except that it wasn't done sooner, news at 11!"

So long, hope we never meet again!

Quoting: F.UltraThe age old "how hard can it be". Well quite often: much.

Yup!

I think a lot of modern game stores felt that in particular against Steam "How hard could it be knock Valve out the way and bring the money to us instead?"

You only have to look at the numbers to see the answer to that....

If there's one thing you can say about the majority of Steam users; they'll prefer to buy there games on steam, every time instead of using another store and they'll get angry when you say "This game is exclusive to our store now and not on steam!".

or my favourite: "We're pulling all our current and future games off of steam! You must use <store name> instead from now on!"

Though with that said, many steam users might use other stores to buy.. steam activation keys.

In my view Valve have earned this right though, they've done a ton of stuff that benefits gamers in many ways, while keeping the store's own in-house DRM relatively lightweight (in comparison to other game stores, not about what third party DRM games can additionally add, just talking about the standard SteamAPI DRM)

Other examples:
"How hard could it be to get people to ditch their iPods for our Zunes?" - Microsoft
"How hard could it be to get people to use Windows Phone instead of iPhone?" - Microsoft
"How hard could it be to build our own facebook?" - Google (G+)

etc

But it's just business. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

And human nature plays a part, once someone has a favourite it's hard to get them to change their minds. Some people can even become blinkered for their favourite brands to the point of refusing to acknowledge or accept failings/shortcomings of their favourite brand.


Last edited by BlackBloodRum on 29 September 2022 at 8:33 pm UTC

Quoting: BlackBloodRumI wonder if they'll do real refunds to your bank account, or just give you credit to your google account so that you have to still use their services to use your refunds?

That would be okay for me. I get back about 280€. Could invest that in a Google Pixel 7, which I want to buy. :)

I have successfully transferred save data (at least for Octopath Traveler) by exporting from Google Takeout, downloading to my Steam Deck and renaming the save files to match the local file names. Achievements are lost, but at least 60hrs of progress isn’t.

With Google stadia they wanted to become barons of gaming. Rent your games forever and own nothing, kick you out and lose everything when you cant afford the admission fee or have opinions they don't like.

Glad it's finally gone. And if the financially successful Steam Deck is proving anything, it's that people actually like to OWN PHYSICAL THINGS they can touch.


Last edited by Lofty on 11 October 2022 at 3:11 pm UTC

so what happens to exclusives like guilty?

Quoting: Klaas

Quoting: kuhpunktheld seminars

If I recall correctly, they claimed that they were cleverer than the wine developers because they needed so much time.


Anyhow, I'm glad that this scheme is dead.

I hope you do realize that a lot of Stadia people worked on Vulkan tools, or funding for such work was provided by Stadia.

You may not care about Stadia itself, but this is terrible news for Vulkan.

Oh no all three people that thought it was gonna take off are gonna be devisated still they will get that one game back they bought when it launched

I am guessing those people also thought onlive was the future


Last edited by Whitewolfe80 on 29 September 2022 at 10:10 pm UTC

I got to play games like *and* get a refund afterwards? How not to love Stadia, really?
There's also a TAKEAWAY option to download your saves and (hopefully) use them in the versions purchased from steam etc. Won't always work (I don't have much hopes for Hitman 3 as it uses online sync and cross-platform is not supported), but Cyberpunk should work and many others as well. It's bittersweet as I liked Stadia but it is what it is.

PS. I've actually been using more stadia than ever recently, thanks to a free month of Ubisoft+, playing Far Cry 6. I don't know how well it runs on Linux otherwise and I'm glad I didn't have to find out, on Stadia it runs perfect, and I'll miss that.


Last edited by pb on 29 September 2022 at 10:18 pm UTC

Quoting: pbI got to play games like *and* get a refund afterwards? How not to love Stadia, really?
There's also a TAKEAWAY option to download your saves and (hopefully) use them in the versions purchased from steam etc. Won't always work (I don't have much hopes for Hitman 3 as it uses online sync and cross-platform is not supported), but Cyberpunk should work and many others as well. It's bittersweet as I liked Stadia but it is what it is.

Okay help me out here not being douchy why did you like a service where you have to pay to get the hardware pay to be a member then actually buy the game with craptastic prices

Quoting: Whitewolfe80Okay help me out here not being douchy why did you like a service where you have to pay to get the hardware pay to be a member then actually buy the game with craptastic prices

Oh wow, so many misconceptions here!

1. I didn't have to pay for the hardware, I play it in Chrome browser. Keyboard+mouse or any controller. I have also configured it on SteamDeck and it works seamlessly.

2. I didn't have to pay for the subscription. I could play all the games I purchased and then some free ones like Destiny 2. I could also subscribe to get 4k and whatnot, plus lots of free games. But since I prefer a certain set of games and don't really play on a 4k tv, it didn't appeal to me

3. If you treat it as just another platform, it's obvious that you need to buy games to play on it. That said, I mostly bought games that I did not have on other platforms and/or were not released on Steam, so I wasn't doublespending.

4. What about the prices? The games went for pennies on sales, you can check the price history here: https://stadiadb.app/ (bad interface, but hopefully doable) and there were even deeper discounts for pro members. Anecdotally, when Stadia launched I got a free month of Pro which also gave me a $10 dollar coupon and at the same time they had Borderlands 3 Ultimate for $10,49 or something like that, so I got it basically for free. To keep.

That's a shame. I never used it myself, as I stick to games I can run directly on Linux, but stadia has definitely been a help when easing the transition from windows to linux when the game they wanted wasn't playable directly on linux.

Specifically crap games like destiny 2 that they just can't live without because their friends play it. IMHO they need new friends, but that's a hard sell to anyone who tries to have a social life.

Quotebusiness model that Google had with you needing to buy full-price games was pretty much doomed.

The only thing wrong with the "business model" was that they completely failed to communicate what the buisness modal actually was.

Xbox Cloud and Luma require a subscription to use and you lose access to them completely if you ever cancel your subscription. Playstation Plus requires to to pay a subscription and buy an expensive piece of hardware. Geforce Now requires you to pay a subscription and buy games individually.

Stadia gave you a choice: either subscribe and get games as part of a subscription (but lose them if you cancel your subscription), or buy games individually and never have to pay a subscription. But that didn't matter, because potential customers couldn't figure out what it actually required (many people mistakenly thought it required both individual purchases and subscriptions.)

For example, exhibit A:

Quoting: Whitewolfe80Okay help me out here not being douchy why did you like a service where you have to pay to get the hardware pay to be a member then actually buy the game with craptastic prices

None of those were true. You didn't need to pay for hardware, and you had to either pay a subscription or buy the game on it's own, not both.