The one thing that Stadia got right or lessons in shutting down an online service
Stadia will shut its doors on 18th of January 2023 and for me it will be a sad day but one thing I won’t feel is ripped off as Google has (games so far) or is in the process of refunding all my purchases on the platform.
I find it ironic that the one thing that everybody would mention as a reason for not using Stadia, namely the fear of Google closing Stadia down and losing all the games that had been bought in Stadia would turn out to be not a problem at all, as Google decided to do the decent thing and offer refunds for the games bought as well as the hardware.
So I do wonder whether had this guarantee been offered would the take up have been better? In other words, if Google had said something like: if we close Stadia down within the next 5 years you will get a full refund and if it’s within the next 10 years you will get a partial refund.
I suspect that people would not have believed it, but now that they have taken this unusual step I hope that this becomes more common where some sort of partial refunds become the norm, unlikely but here is hoping.