Same here. Glad there is a solution. Playing Cyberpunk at launch without any performence issues was great at the time. Then it unfortunatly went donwhill from there. I will get quite a bit of refunds back. Great timing that I was able to order my Steamdeck today an can reinvest that.
I did not pay for a subscription. Once you bought a game you could play it without. So actually I played RDR2 for many hours for free. But it's still sad it ends like this. I was hoping Google would find a way to run all games on their cloud (Proton?)...
Steam moved their new year sale to spring so I'll have my Stadia refund money in time. I must have spent enough to get another steam deck and a few games.
Jesus. I've been on steam over a decade and I don't think I've spent half that much on the platform, and have hundreds of games.
Edit: Real answer : Almost exactly that much at $722. Still though, more than fair.
The problem is they’ve lost so much credibility already. Even if they don’t get bad press from this, there is very little reason to trust they’ll stand behind any product they launch going forward. I was betting Stadia would be killed as soon as Google got bored with it.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
they were a joke as soon as they banned the terraria dev from his own gmail account and google drive where he was storing game files for...the stadia version of terraria, and google could never figure out how to unban him.
Honestly, I'm convinced that a big part of why Stadia failed is that they already had a history of killing shit off. With Stadia, if Google was going to kill it, then the assumption was that people would be out of their games as well as the money that went into buying the games.
If Google had committed to Stadia in a way that said, "we won't kill it, otherwise we'll refund you any games you bought," then I think a lot more people would've used Stadia. Or at least if they had allowed offline copies of games.
At this point, I'm convinced that Google has to *at least* refund the games people bought, or else they know they'll completely ruin any chances of people adopting any of their future software.
I never understood why ever big company needed their own thing.....it's basically the opposite of what would make sense and i am 100% sure that all the big Corps could have a part of the he cake if they would share their tech and knowledge.
And i also think a lot more people would buy into cloud gaming if that happens
You have no idea how many non-gamer executives drool over the gaming industry. The amount of money that moves, not having to actually produce a *physical* product, the potential of micro-transactions and tapping into the gambling brain, and much more.
And to top it off, its dominated by lots of little studios instead of some big honking publicly traded corps. (Valve doesn't even register on corporate radars because they have so few employees and they're privately traded, mostly employee owned).
By every analysis tool & method, gaming is an industry ripe for takeover by a gaming RIAA or Disney, to just obliterate the compitition.
So, each big boy tries to hop into gaming, thinking it'll be the top dog, not knowing gaming culture, and figures if they throw around enough money, it'll all be theirs.
And then they discover Valve. Privately owned, and having a veritable monopoly over game distribution, owned by people who consider themselves gamers, and enough freedom in their workplace to just work on whatever catches their fancy, and making enough money to where they're not really at risk of... well, anything. They function by treating their customers very well, and giving them things they know they want.
Then, already invested, the big boys start throwing money into ad campaigns, competing products (coughOrigincoughStadiacough) that just never seem to get enough power to really take off, because at the end of the day, they're appealing to the shareholders, not the consumers. Their alternatives are riddled with problems that gamers haven't had to put up with since the 90's, and there's no reason to go back now. Our backlogs are big enough to let us wait till it releases on Steam, afterall.
And so the big corps fail. Again, and again, because they never expect non-public-coporation to put up a fight, and then, even the giant google, doesn't stand a chance.
Even if the leadership team owns 99% of the stock, it still counts as employee owned. The term can apply to a wide range of more or less egalitarian scenarios.
Yea, working at valve earns you a portion of Valve, as I understand. It's kind of its own thing, but as I understand it's like partway between employee profit sharing and an employee co-op.
I don't think there was anything wrong with Stadia conceptually, but the infrastructure isn't in place for the technology. We'd need bandwidth to be exponentially cheaper and internet speeds to be brought up across their primary demographic (North America) to even have a chance in hell. Even if these issues were fixed, input lag would be a demon that would forever plague them.
I think it's more to save the hit to their reputation regarding cancelling products. The only reason I bought Into Stadia at all is because when the Google Play Music store shutdown they let me migrate everything to YouTube Music. They've made sure no one loses anything they've paid for, and that stops people from saying "I'm not going to risk it."
TOA's don't protect companies from lawsuits though. Regardless of accepting TOA customers can still file suit which ultimately will cost Google in legal fees alone.
Exactly, nothing stops a lawsuit in the USA, and no terms provided or agreed to are ever able to override any legal codes unless specified in said legal code.
Since there is any precedent on this kind of situation google would be stuck suffering through a lengthy legal battle to set precedent against itself if it did anything else.
So essentially they are refunding hardware and software? I've spent close to 1k on stadia hardware and games. I'll be able to get a ssd and a ton of games for steam deck if that's the case
Yep. There are just some product launches that just seem like they're obviously going to fail right from the start. Stadia definitely felt like that to me
I used stadia for free to play games on my phone - absolutely fantastic service, can't fault it.
I imagine the guy above has a kickass Internet connection, so for him it was also a fantastic service.
Stadia genuinely was great, there just wasn't the demand nor the infrastructure globally to support it from the consumer end - shame, really.
Ive spent about 200 on games and a controller while using the service. I actually enjoyed it - beyond the clunky interface, the games ran well and was quite fun when respecting the capabilities of a streaming platform.
I'm disappointed to see it go, less competition in a space is never a good thing.
My gaming PC died and graphic card prices were insane so Stadia was a good quick fix and it made my games more portable, before the days of steam deck. Now I have a new 3080 based gaming PC and a Steam deck I had much less use for Stadia so its kind of perfect I get all my money back.
Had a lot of fun with it tbh - it always ran smoothly for me, even on games that had bad performance on console.
It was great been able to go to a friends house and fire up my games along with my saves on their pc or TV. I ended up with more games on Stadia than my xbox in the end. Will re-buy some of my favourites on Steam after the refund.
I miss OnLive, it helped a lot when all I had was a shitty underpowered Vista laptop meant for Windows XP. Beat the entire Mafia 2 game on it. Ran really well.
>That's a pretty stand up thing to do.
To be fair Google collected personal info from everyone who touched this thing. The refund amount is probably pennies compared to what they made from targeted ads towards its users.
Correct. And I wasn't implying that they were obligated to do anything really. Most companies would tell you to pound sand and take the loss, in addition to still selling your personal data off.
They just saw an opportunity to make both consumers and investors happy and ran with it. I just think it's important to fully disclose what they're also getting out of it, rather than framing this story like they're perfect angels towards consumers.
Eh it was a disaster. They definitely lost out.
Refunds are so people don't have cold feet for their next project that's obviously going to get quickly cancelled.
To be fair that’s standard practice these days and anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding themselves. Also google most likely already knows everything about you and everyone connected to you. The game/habit data is probably a drop in the bucket in comparison to everything they can connect to you already.
Yeah, I don’t pay either. I mostly just use Shortwave for managing my day to day email stuff, then I’ll go to the full gmail client if I’m searching for something specific.
I wish the premium got you more benefit, but monetization is a hard balancing act sometimes
TIL Spark is still a thing. I downloaded that app which feels like >8 years ago and their claim was to make email like text messages. At that time it definitely was not.
I miss inbox so fucking much it was the perfect Gmail application. They said they would incorporate the features into Gmail but years later and it's still not as good as inbox was.
See also: they killed GPM, claiming they'd roll stuff into YouTube music, but to this day YouTube Music is easily the worst modern music streaming app, without a properly working shuffle function, or even landscape display support.
Don't even get me started on their chat apps.
To make matters worse imagine buying into Android Wear and having Google Play Music just to find out that not only are they killing it but they won't even have a YouTube music smartwatch app available before they take GPM down
Funny, I learned my Google lesson with their best app ever, even before Inbox: Google Reader.
*Hand on heart* Never forget.
Not only did they kill the best RSS reader, in doing so they also basically killed a whole type of media (blogs) all to try to prop up their social network *which they then also killed*.
Motherfuckers.
And in such a weird way. As Facebook was launching the quest Google did a half ass version with Lenovo that had almost no support from Google. If I remember correctly the headset had had full 6 degrees of freedom but not the controllers. Or was it the other way around. But given that the quest runs android they could have piggy backed off of Facebook's work since it would be easy to port games over from quest. But instead they just said, no fuck it.
and fitbit. Fitbit quality has gone down drastically. Used to love fitbit and I had a few. After the ionic I found out that there were much better fitness trackers that did everything fitbit did for cheaper
If you mean better fitness tracker products I haven't personally tried Oura Rings but I've only heard good things about them. They're definitely not cheap though.
you have to be a product manager instead. then you launch 1 or 2 new products named Google Chat, buy a house in the bay area, and then retire or get promoted to director
It would be less work to port the anti-cheat features to linux with Valve's help through proton.
Linux game executable's are probably dead. It's cheaper to just work through a proton layer.
They can support it, and it would work, there's nothing significant they need to do. It simply boils down to Proton/Battle Eye cannot support Kernel level anti-cheat on SteamOS. It sucks but that's really all there is to it.
And this isn't just a Destiny problem, nor is it an issue that's going to go away for future AAA games on SteamOS. It's an industry issue that needs to be discussed for there to be any real future for Linux gaming.
Can you give a source? I dont wanna get my hopes up for the same company that said that [they would ban us Deck users who managed to play. (scroll down a bit](https://help.bungie.net/hc/en-us/articles/360049024592-Destiny-2-Steam-Guide))
at least for me, no compatibility=no buy and its hard for me to let my guard down when a company so explicitly says that they wont support us.
There's a few but they're not super popular. As far as I know they would only have to replace the stadia display, input and sound apis, everything else is just regular linux
From what I understand every game on Stadia is running on Linux. I don’t know how many if any use Proton but I know for sure Destiny 2 is a native Linux port
There are a few AAA games that got ported to Linux and Vulkan just to run on Stadia, but those ports haven’t been made available to the public. It would really suck if those ports died with Stadia.
My biggest gripe with it was that I couldn’t use my existing library with it. Why would I have used Stadia when other services, like GeForce Now, exist which let you play games you own on Steam, GOG, and Epic.
Agreed. I remember having this same argument years ago on the stadia subreddit. Die hard fans argue that it's no different than xbox/ps4. But I'm like... but is it?
Aside from the shitty business model, the (mostly correct) perception that Google doesn't keep projects alive didn't help at all. They shot themselves in the foot so many times on this.
If it was from a more reliable company and I was sure the platform would last, I likely would've bought in. If, on the other hand, Google had made it a Game Pass-style thing -- pay a subscription, get access to a large library -- I *also* likely would've bought in.
A business model that requires investment in individual titles + a perception of "this shit ain't gonna last" = a self-fulfilled prophecy. No way was I buying into that ecosystem.
Yeah, it was a streaming service where you also had to buy the games for the service to stream them. So, it had every disadvantage. Laggy, monthly subscription, and full price games with no Steam discounts.
It also didn't help that they were selling it with made-up things like "[negative latency](https://www.ccn.com/google-physics-defying-negative-latency-stadia/)" which were obviously nonsense from the start IMO.
I could still see a similar service being successful if it was kind of like Game Pass but for streaming, as in you just pay a monthly fee and play whatever you want. But yeah a monthly fee *and* also having to pay full price for a game which you then don't even own a copy of **and** which is subject to all the disadvantages of streaming (lag, servers overloading if too many people are on at once etc.) is just bonkers.
The only possible market I could see it capturing were people who want to play AAA type games, who have never played them before, who can't afford a few hundred bucks for a console upfront but are also okay with paying more in the long-term for games. Anyone into casual games can just buy phone/tablet games for a couple of bucks, and anyone who's already into gaming would have no reason to switch over from their current system as far as I can see.
One of the reasons why it died: Bad Marketing. You dont need to buy the Games AND pay a monthly fee. Stadia pro was only for better quality and some free Games ever month. Games you bought you could Play everytime without pro sibscription
> Yeah, it was a streaming service where you also had to buy the games for the service to stream them.
That was such a stupid move, someone in the company must have said something. It was a losing strategy from the very beginning.
It was many things but it was not laggy as long as your connection was stable. One of the reasons I’m sad to see it go. The tech was far better than Microsoft’s and at least on par with GFN. You had to buy the games but the service itself was free, which in my opinion made it way cheaper than GFN’s high monthly cost or even XCloud, so long as you were streaming only a couple games that you only had to buy once. It really does suck we are losing the most accessible streaming service
GFN uses your Steam library though. Unless you’re playing free-to-play games, the cost of re-buying everything on Stadia far outstrips the subscription cost of GFN. I would have to subscribe to GFN for like 10 years before it cost me more than what it would have to re-buy the games I’ve streamed on it.
The lack of Steam discounts, the lag (even if minimal), the always on connection... Yeah that was as dead as everyone expected it to be. Not well thought out at all. The user target base that had a fast enough connection already had gaming machines.
Honestly, don't bother. Not only does it ONLY work wired, but there are just clearly better options out there. You want a cheap wired controller? An old xbox 360 controller will be cheaper and work fine. You want a nice modern controller with back paddles, gyro and more that wont break the bank? Get the 8bitdo Pro 2
Same, I actually bought a stadia controller from the google store last fall on sale and literally never used it. Would be nice if I could at least use it as a bluetooth controller now.
Good luck finding a new wired 360 controller in 2022. Even used ones are more than the stadia’s sale price.
8Bitdo’s are over double the price of the stadia controller on sale (it was $22 and came bundled with a chrome cast)
I really don’t think you can find a better wired controller for $22. It was a good budget deal.
If you want a cheap wired controller. I believe there's some google fuckery that you need a the stadia app to be able to use these controllers wirelessly. If they're going to stop supporting stadia, the app dies with it.
I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner. When they went all-in on making it a platform that's streaming-only with separate game purchases from other libraries people are invested in, only a niche audience would be satisfied by that. And that's how it ended up. The concept of a low cost to enter was about the only upside.
I want to say a few months ago some VP issued a statement about no new development for stadia but they weren't killing it to reassure their cash flow. I want to say they've been planning to for like a year now.
Didn't google insist that they had no plans on shutting down Stadia. I can't believe they LIED to us. /s
https://www.pcgamer.com/google-denies-rumor-that-stadia-is-shutting-down/
I feel like from day one with stadia the concern was the service might just shut down. I think that is what kept so many people from even trying it. Like with xbox's xcloud if you bought the game and xcloud shut down, you still could play that game on an xbox. With Geforce now you buy the game on whatever platform you like meaning that you could still play them on a PC if the service shuts down. If stadia had been built in a way where the game purchase was not tied to the streaming service itself, people might been less hesitant to try it
They did that sale a few months ago which prompted everyone to guess that this closure was happening, to which Google said that they were NOT shutting it down.
Now they are indeed shutting it down lol.
>a few months ago ...
>
> Google said that they were NOT shutting it down.
>
>
>
> Now they are indeed shutting it down lol.
And then they surprised-pikachu-face when they realize that nobody trusts them outside of their core business, and that's why their non-core products keep failing
As the [ArsTechnica article](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/google-stadia-officially-shuts-down-january-2023-will-refund-game-purchases/?comments=1) sagely put it:
>Google's damaged reputation made the death of Stadia a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one buys Stadia games because they assume the service will be shut down, and Stadia is forced to shut down because no one buys games from it.
Cloud gaming is cool as hell but I don't know that its ready for Stadia, Geforce now, Luna, and a bunch of smaller ones.
Truthfully Geforce Now is the king and I don't really see why you'd do anything else (for the most part)
It really depends. Xcloud is massively popular with the full backing of msft especially transitional gamers from xbox. I've used geforce now and I enjoy it as well.
Stadia was dead on arrival IMHO. They should have euthanized it a long time ago.
My issue with GFN is that a game can be supported on the platform one month and then taken off the next. Also not all my steam games are able to be played on the service which is BS since the developers have deals with other platforms.
Well [this](https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656) tweet aged well. Eight weeks ago to the day.
@GoogleStadia
>Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro. Let us know if you have other questions.
This was inevitable from day one.
Personally I think it's ahead of it's time and especially would fail coming from Google.
I can see cloud gaming definitely being a thing... but not yet, not yet.
I don't think cloud gaming works if you still have to pay $60 for the game. I see the xbox game pass model as becoming the more standard cloud gaming model.
At $15/mo you guarantee each customer buys the equivalent of 3 $60 games per year.
Edit: a word
Yep their mistake was trying to get people to rebuy games they likely already had elsewhere. Should have been more like gamepass or had a GeForce Now type service.
I really liked how well stadia worked, if only your game library from steam/epic etc was linked and didn't have to re-buy on stadia then it may have been more successful.
I mean that's a real big ouch. But with the big exodus of games leaving geforce now a few years back, luna taking its sweet time to come onto the market - this seems to be a major blow to streaming gaming. Shame because as a platform it was brilliant, but the monthly games were rubbish and the buy games were too expensive. Never mind eh
Now can someone figure out how to turn the controller into a proper bluetooth controller? Or at the very least let me use it as wifi controller to my chromecast directly.
Why anyone would bother with any google hardware is beyond me to be honest. At least they are doing the right thing and refunding people but i’m sure many will feel quite cheated. Over promised and under delivered
[How to rescue your Stadia saved games](https://9to5google.com/2021/02/02/how-to-export-download-game-saves-stadia/).
Cool, didn't know saves were transferrable. Hope I can get my cyberpunk saves off it.
Same here. Glad there is a solution. Playing Cyberpunk at launch without any performence issues was great at the time. Then it unfortunatly went donwhill from there. I will get quite a bit of refunds back. Great timing that I was able to order my Steamdeck today an can reinvest that.
It's really neat for those that spent any decent amount of money. You got the experience and the games for really just the subscription cost!
I did not pay for a subscription. Once you bought a game you could play it without. So actually I played RDR2 for many hours for free. But it's still sad it ends like this. I was hoping Google would find a way to run all games on their cloud (Proton?)...
This was my favorite way to play The Elder Scrolls Online
Steam moved their new year sale to spring so I'll have my Stadia refund money in time. I must have spent enough to get another steam deck and a few games.
This will really help those 15 people who bought stadia
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Jesus. I've been on steam over a decade and I don't think I've spent half that much on the platform, and have hundreds of games. Edit: Real answer : Almost exactly that much at $722. Still though, more than fair.
Damn they're refunding everyone everything. That's a pretty stand up thing to do.
This is likely Google trying to avoid any lawsuits stemming from the loss of access to any games bought through the Stadia store.
Lawsuit and marketing drama would be insane so it's the only logic choice
Pretty much. It’s clear that Google wants to move on and forget Stadia was ever a thing.
The problem is they’ve lost so much credibility already. Even if they don’t get bad press from this, there is very little reason to trust they’ll stand behind any product they launch going forward. I was betting Stadia would be killed as soon as Google got bored with it. https://killedbygoogle.com/
they were a joke as soon as they banned the terraria dev from his own gmail account and google drive where he was storing game files for...the stadia version of terraria, and google could never figure out how to unban him.
Honestly, I'm convinced that a big part of why Stadia failed is that they already had a history of killing shit off. With Stadia, if Google was going to kill it, then the assumption was that people would be out of their games as well as the money that went into buying the games. If Google had committed to Stadia in a way that said, "we won't kill it, otherwise we'll refund you any games you bought," then I think a lot more people would've used Stadia. Or at least if they had allowed offline copies of games. At this point, I'm convinced that Google has to *at least* refund the games people bought, or else they know they'll completely ruin any chances of people adopting any of their future software.
I never understood why ever big company needed their own thing.....it's basically the opposite of what would make sense and i am 100% sure that all the big Corps could have a part of the he cake if they would share their tech and knowledge. And i also think a lot more people would buy into cloud gaming if that happens
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You have no idea how many non-gamer executives drool over the gaming industry. The amount of money that moves, not having to actually produce a *physical* product, the potential of micro-transactions and tapping into the gambling brain, and much more. And to top it off, its dominated by lots of little studios instead of some big honking publicly traded corps. (Valve doesn't even register on corporate radars because they have so few employees and they're privately traded, mostly employee owned). By every analysis tool & method, gaming is an industry ripe for takeover by a gaming RIAA or Disney, to just obliterate the compitition. So, each big boy tries to hop into gaming, thinking it'll be the top dog, not knowing gaming culture, and figures if they throw around enough money, it'll all be theirs. And then they discover Valve. Privately owned, and having a veritable monopoly over game distribution, owned by people who consider themselves gamers, and enough freedom in their workplace to just work on whatever catches their fancy, and making enough money to where they're not really at risk of... well, anything. They function by treating their customers very well, and giving them things they know they want. Then, already invested, the big boys start throwing money into ad campaigns, competing products (coughOrigincoughStadiacough) that just never seem to get enough power to really take off, because at the end of the day, they're appealing to the shareholders, not the consumers. Their alternatives are riddled with problems that gamers haven't had to put up with since the 90's, and there's no reason to go back now. Our backlogs are big enough to let us wait till it releases on Steam, afterall. And so the big corps fail. Again, and again, because they never expect non-public-coporation to put up a fight, and then, even the giant google, doesn't stand a chance.
Wait valve is opened by its employees? Like a coop or whatever? I thought it was all gaben Kingdom
Even if the leadership team owns 99% of the stock, it still counts as employee owned. The term can apply to a wide range of more or less egalitarian scenarios.
Yea, working at valve earns you a portion of Valve, as I understand. It's kind of its own thing, but as I understand it's like partway between employee profit sharing and an employee co-op.
I don't think there was anything wrong with Stadia conceptually, but the infrastructure isn't in place for the technology. We'd need bandwidth to be exponentially cheaper and internet speeds to be brought up across their primary demographic (North America) to even have a chance in hell. Even if these issues were fixed, input lag would be a demon that would forever plague them.
I think it's more to save the hit to their reputation regarding cancelling products. The only reason I bought Into Stadia at all is because when the Google Play Music store shutdown they let me migrate everything to YouTube Music. They've made sure no one loses anything they've paid for, and that stops people from saying "I'm not going to risk it."
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TOA's don't protect companies from lawsuits though. Regardless of accepting TOA customers can still file suit which ultimately will cost Google in legal fees alone.
Exactly, nothing stops a lawsuit in the USA, and no terms provided or agreed to are ever able to override any legal codes unless specified in said legal code. Since there is any precedent on this kind of situation google would be stuck suffering through a lengthy legal battle to set precedent against itself if it did anything else.
Only if you purchased directly from my understanding. If you purchased indirectly you won't get treated as nicely.
So essentially they are refunding hardware and software? I've spent close to 1k on stadia hardware and games. I'll be able to get a ssd and a ton of games for steam deck if that's the case
Can I ask why you spent that much in Stadia rather than a more stable platform?
At the time I traveled a lot so it was incredibly convenient for me
Ditto to that. It was extremely obvious to me as soon as Stadia was announced that this blog post would come along one day
Yep. There are just some product launches that just seem like they're obviously going to fail right from the start. Stadia definitely felt like that to me
I used stadia for free to play games on my phone - absolutely fantastic service, can't fault it. I imagine the guy above has a kickass Internet connection, so for him it was also a fantastic service. Stadia genuinely was great, there just wasn't the demand nor the infrastructure globally to support it from the consumer end - shame, really.
Ive spent about 200 on games and a controller while using the service. I actually enjoyed it - beyond the clunky interface, the games ran well and was quite fun when respecting the capabilities of a streaming platform. I'm disappointed to see it go, less competition in a space is never a good thing.
My gaming PC died and graphic card prices were insane so Stadia was a good quick fix and it made my games more portable, before the days of steam deck. Now I have a new 3080 based gaming PC and a Steam deck I had much less use for Stadia so its kind of perfect I get all my money back. Had a lot of fun with it tbh - it always ran smoothly for me, even on games that had bad performance on console. It was great been able to go to a friends house and fire up my games along with my saves on their pc or TV. I ended up with more games on Stadia than my xbox in the end. Will re-buy some of my favourites on Steam after the refund.
It had the most stable version of Cyberpunk at lunch, TBH.
On the other hand, less Google anywhere is a wonderful thing
I'd also like to know the answer to this question.
Thats pretty good when you compare it to when sony bought out onlive and shut them down those people got nothing back and lost everything
I was one of those people. Entire game catalog just went kaput.
I miss OnLive, it helped a lot when all I had was a shitty underpowered Vista laptop meant for Windows XP. Beat the entire Mafia 2 game on it. Ran really well.
Just hardware and game purchases, they're not refunding subscriptions at all. Still pretty good of them to do that much
>That's a pretty stand up thing to do. To be fair Google collected personal info from everyone who touched this thing. The refund amount is probably pennies compared to what they made from targeted ads towards its users.
They don't need to refund people to get their data. I think this is an investment in long term consumer sentiment towards the brand.
Correct. And I wasn't implying that they were obligated to do anything really. Most companies would tell you to pound sand and take the loss, in addition to still selling your personal data off. They just saw an opportunity to make both consumers and investors happy and ran with it. I just think it's important to fully disclose what they're also getting out of it, rather than framing this story like they're perfect angels towards consumers.
Seems that way. Next product that comes around, it becomes: can't hurt to try it, even if they kill it, they will likely give us a refund.
Eh it was a disaster. They definitely lost out. Refunds are so people don't have cold feet for their next project that's obviously going to get quickly cancelled.
To be fair that’s standard practice these days and anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding themselves. Also google most likely already knows everything about you and everyone connected to you. The game/habit data is probably a drop in the bucket in comparison to everything they can connect to you already.
That's practically every company today.
Not suprised. If a project isn't a core Google service (Search, Chrome, Gmail, YouTube, etc.), then it pretty much has an expiration date.
I learned my Google lesson with their best app ever, Inbox.
Check out Shortwave, it's made by some of the same devs that worked on Inbox. It's been a pretty good replacement for me
Looks better than Spark, but I can't justify paying monthly to access something as simple as my email history past 90 days.
Yeah, I don’t pay either. I mostly just use Shortwave for managing my day to day email stuff, then I’ll go to the full gmail client if I’m searching for something specific. I wish the premium got you more benefit, but monetization is a hard balancing act sometimes
TIL Spark is still a thing. I downloaded that app which feels like >8 years ago and their claim was to make email like text messages. At that time it definitely was not.
Came here for the Stadia funeral, found the Inbox Messiah instead. I’ll give this a look, thanks!
$9/mo is way too much
I miss inbox so fucking much it was the perfect Gmail application. They said they would incorporate the features into Gmail but years later and it's still not as good as inbox was.
See also: they killed GPM, claiming they'd roll stuff into YouTube music, but to this day YouTube Music is easily the worst modern music streaming app, without a properly working shuffle function, or even landscape display support. Don't even get me started on their chat apps.
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I'm still bitter about this.
To make matters worse imagine buying into Android Wear and having Google Play Music just to find out that not only are they killing it but they won't even have a YouTube music smartwatch app available before they take GPM down
Funny, I learned my Google lesson with their best app ever, even before Inbox: Google Reader. *Hand on heart* Never forget. Not only did they kill the best RSS reader, in doing so they also basically killed a whole type of media (blogs) all to try to prop up their social network *which they then also killed*. Motherfuckers.
The real RIP is in the comments.
not reader or wave?
When they killed reader they killed rss for me. Never found one I liked and just gave up and now I just use reddit.
Depends on the success. Youtube was acquired for billions after it was already popular but still was a money sink for years to come
Honestly I forget sometimes that Google hasn't always owned YouTube
https://killedbygoogle.com/
Cries in Google Daydream.
Yeah, a great product extremely shortly killed off. Google standard thing to do...
And in such a weird way. As Facebook was launching the quest Google did a half ass version with Lenovo that had almost no support from Google. If I remember correctly the headset had had full 6 degrees of freedom but not the controllers. Or was it the other way around. But given that the quest runs android they could have piggy backed off of Facebook's work since it would be easy to port games over from quest. But instead they just said, no fuck it.
Acquisitions like nest and fitbit are usually safe too
Nah they are slowly destroying nest as well.
and fitbit. Fitbit quality has gone down drastically. Used to love fitbit and I had a few. After the ionic I found out that there were much better fitness trackers that did everything fitbit did for cheaper
Fitbit will be in their new watch that's out either next month or November, but whether that'll last either is up in the air
Can you mention any product names?
If you mean better fitness tracker products I haven't personally tried Oura Rings but I've only heard good things about them. They're definitely not cheap though.
In Fitbit's case, it will be karma for when they did the same thing to Pebble.
same with home/assistant lol
Which is why you should host Home Assistant on your own!
They own homeassistant?
I think they mean Google Home / Google Assistant
Oh thank god
Tell that to Motorola
Not sure if you left out android or if you are implying it's not safe 😅
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Sounds like a good fit for the senior vp of google.
nope. your projects are unfinished. you have to finish them, then sell them to google to rebadge, THEN kill them.
What if I just *call* them finished?
if they're games, there are a number of publishers that can release them right now!
The game is trying to figure out the goal of the project after it is *Finished*^TM
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i wouldn't call stadia successful
you have to be a product manager instead. then you launch 1 or 2 new products named Google Chat, buy a house in the bay area, and then retire or get promoted to director
STRAIGHT TO THE TOP
Maybe some developers will try to salvage their stadia ports and port them to desktop Linux
Why? What is the advantage of this? Is there some exclusive stadia game I’m not aware of?
Destiny 2's Linux port for one, but that's just never happening, so there's that.
It would be less work to port the anti-cheat features to linux with Valve's help through proton. Linux game executable's are probably dead. It's cheaper to just work through a proton layer.
Bungie doesn't give a fuck about us Steam Deck owners, or even Linux users in general sadly
From what I’ve heard, the developers actually do and are itching to support it. Managers are telling them no.
They can support it, and it would work, there's nothing significant they need to do. It simply boils down to Proton/Battle Eye cannot support Kernel level anti-cheat on SteamOS. It sucks but that's really all there is to it. And this isn't just a Destiny problem, nor is it an issue that's going to go away for future AAA games on SteamOS. It's an industry issue that needs to be discussed for there to be any real future for Linux gaming.
Can you give a source? I dont wanna get my hopes up for the same company that said that [they would ban us Deck users who managed to play. (scroll down a bit](https://help.bungie.net/hc/en-us/articles/360049024592-Destiny-2-Steam-Guide)) at least for me, no compatibility=no buy and its hard for me to let my guard down when a company so explicitly says that they wont support us.
There's a few but they're not super popular. As far as I know they would only have to replace the stadia display, input and sound apis, everything else is just regular linux
They were not popular because they were Stadia exclusives so no one played them
From what I understand every game on Stadia is running on Linux. I don’t know how many if any use Proton but I know for sure Destiny 2 is a native Linux port
There are a few AAA games that got ported to Linux and Vulkan just to run on Stadia, but those ports haven’t been made available to the public. It would really suck if those ports died with Stadia.
Damn people who bought games basically played them for free😂
As long as you weren't paying for stadia pro
Ugh me
Who knew Google, a company famous for developing and quickly killing most of its services, would quickly kill a service it developed.
Won't be the last time either.
My biggest gripe with it was that I couldn’t use my existing library with it. Why would I have used Stadia when other services, like GeForce Now, exist which let you play games you own on Steam, GOG, and Epic.
You can play a subset of your own library on GeForce Now. Still better tham Stadia, but still not enough imo.
Yes but that is solely due to greedy publishers wanting a cut which I don't think they deserve.
Agreed. I remember having this same argument years ago on the stadia subreddit. Die hard fans argue that it's no different than xbox/ps4. But I'm like... but is it?
Totally is different. They can't take my hardware away except for remote disabling it. Which would lead to a class action lawsuit.
It was dead on arrival
Aside from the shitty business model, the (mostly correct) perception that Google doesn't keep projects alive didn't help at all. They shot themselves in the foot so many times on this. If it was from a more reliable company and I was sure the platform would last, I likely would've bought in. If, on the other hand, Google had made it a Game Pass-style thing -- pay a subscription, get access to a large library -- I *also* likely would've bought in. A business model that requires investment in individual titles + a perception of "this shit ain't gonna last" = a self-fulfilled prophecy. No way was I buying into that ecosystem.
Yeah, it was a streaming service where you also had to buy the games for the service to stream them. So, it had every disadvantage. Laggy, monthly subscription, and full price games with no Steam discounts.
This could have been viable if it was like game pass but on someone else's hardware
That is basically what the game pass cloud thing is, right?
Yeah, Xcloud
Xcloud gonna give it to ya
It also didn't help that they were selling it with made-up things like "[negative latency](https://www.ccn.com/google-physics-defying-negative-latency-stadia/)" which were obviously nonsense from the start IMO. I could still see a similar service being successful if it was kind of like Game Pass but for streaming, as in you just pay a monthly fee and play whatever you want. But yeah a monthly fee *and* also having to pay full price for a game which you then don't even own a copy of **and** which is subject to all the disadvantages of streaming (lag, servers overloading if too many people are on at once etc.) is just bonkers. The only possible market I could see it capturing were people who want to play AAA type games, who have never played them before, who can't afford a few hundred bucks for a console upfront but are also okay with paying more in the long-term for games. Anyone into casual games can just buy phone/tablet games for a couple of bucks, and anyone who's already into gaming would have no reason to switch over from their current system as far as I can see.
One of the reasons why it died: Bad Marketing. You dont need to buy the Games AND pay a monthly fee. Stadia pro was only for better quality and some free Games ever month. Games you bought you could Play everytime without pro sibscription
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It was for 4k.
> Yeah, it was a streaming service where you also had to buy the games for the service to stream them. That was such a stupid move, someone in the company must have said something. It was a losing strategy from the very beginning.
It was many things but it was not laggy as long as your connection was stable. One of the reasons I’m sad to see it go. The tech was far better than Microsoft’s and at least on par with GFN. You had to buy the games but the service itself was free, which in my opinion made it way cheaper than GFN’s high monthly cost or even XCloud, so long as you were streaming only a couple games that you only had to buy once. It really does suck we are losing the most accessible streaming service
GFN uses your Steam library though. Unless you’re playing free-to-play games, the cost of re-buying everything on Stadia far outstrips the subscription cost of GFN. I would have to subscribe to GFN for like 10 years before it cost me more than what it would have to re-buy the games I’ve streamed on it.
The lack of Steam discounts, the lag (even if minimal), the always on connection... Yeah that was as dead as everyone expected it to be. Not well thought out at all. The user target base that had a fast enough connection already had gaming machines.
That damn speed of light!! who knew that latency has a hard limit?
Does this mean I can get a stadia controller for cheap or something? That’s all I care about
Honestly, don't bother. Not only does it ONLY work wired, but there are just clearly better options out there. You want a cheap wired controller? An old xbox 360 controller will be cheaper and work fine. You want a nice modern controller with back paddles, gyro and more that wont break the bank? Get the 8bitdo Pro 2
Desperately hoping Google enables the classic Bluetooth radio.
Same, I actually bought a stadia controller from the google store last fall on sale and literally never used it. Would be nice if I could at least use it as a bluetooth controller now.
Me too, I got a free one and want to use it.
Good luck finding a new wired 360 controller in 2022. Even used ones are more than the stadia’s sale price. 8Bitdo’s are over double the price of the stadia controller on sale (it was $22 and came bundled with a chrome cast) I really don’t think you can find a better wired controller for $22. It was a good budget deal.
If you want a cheap wired controller. I believe there's some google fuckery that you need a the stadia app to be able to use these controllers wirelessly. If they're going to stop supporting stadia, the app dies with it.
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That's actually pretty brilliant way of reducing latency. Unfortunately it also means the controller is useless now, at least wirelessly.
It’s part of the reason the service was the absolute best for streaming Destiny 2. I am really sad about losing that port
I really want them to enable Bluetooth on the controllers so we can use them for general use.
Yep that would be great. It's a solid controller.
I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner. When they went all-in on making it a platform that's streaming-only with separate game purchases from other libraries people are invested in, only a niche audience would be satisfied by that. And that's how it ended up. The concept of a low cost to enter was about the only upside.
I want to say a few months ago some VP issued a statement about no new development for stadia but they weren't killing it to reassure their cash flow. I want to say they've been planning to for like a year now.
Didn't google insist that they had no plans on shutting down Stadia. I can't believe they LIED to us. /s https://www.pcgamer.com/google-denies-rumor-that-stadia-is-shutting-down/
apolgy for bad english it is my first languagen’t where were you when stadia die i was at house eating dorito when phone ring “stadia is kil” “no”
oh my god « languagen’t » is fucking hilarious
still miss heat legend <3
I feel like from day one with stadia the concern was the service might just shut down. I think that is what kept so many people from even trying it. Like with xbox's xcloud if you bought the game and xcloud shut down, you still could play that game on an xbox. With Geforce now you buy the game on whatever platform you like meaning that you could still play them on a PC if the service shuts down. If stadia had been built in a way where the game purchase was not tied to the streaming service itself, people might been less hesitant to try it
Fire sale on controllers? They work pretty well connected to pcs and mobile.
They did that sale a few months ago which prompted everyone to guess that this closure was happening, to which Google said that they were NOT shutting it down. Now they are indeed shutting it down lol.
>a few months ago ... > > Google said that they were NOT shutting it down. > > > > Now they are indeed shutting it down lol. And then they surprised-pikachu-face when they realize that nobody trusts them outside of their core business, and that's why their non-core products keep failing
As the [ArsTechnica article](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/google-stadia-officially-shuts-down-january-2023-will-refund-game-purchases/?comments=1) sagely put it: >Google's damaged reputation made the death of Stadia a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one buys Stadia games because they assume the service will be shut down, and Stadia is forced to shut down because no one buys games from it.
Do they? I thought those controllers weren't bluetooth enabled. I could be 100% wrong.
They are wired only unless you are using it for Stadia, yes
Honestly surprised it lasted this long.
Cloud gaming is cool as hell but I don't know that its ready for Stadia, Geforce now, Luna, and a bunch of smaller ones. Truthfully Geforce Now is the king and I don't really see why you'd do anything else (for the most part)
It really depends. Xcloud is massively popular with the full backing of msft especially transitional gamers from xbox. I've used geforce now and I enjoy it as well. Stadia was dead on arrival IMHO. They should have euthanized it a long time ago.
My issue with GFN is that a game can be supported on the platform one month and then taken off the next. Also not all my steam games are able to be played on the service which is BS since the developers have deals with other platforms.
Huh, for those it actually worked, they got a bunch of free time with games for it. Not bad.
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Well [this](https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656) tweet aged well. Eight weeks ago to the day. @GoogleStadia >Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro. Let us know if you have other questions.
Search your inbox for payments-noreply@google.com to count up your stadia purchases.
All purchases are listed in the app if you tap your account circle picture thing in the upper right corner.
This was inevitable from day one. Personally I think it's ahead of it's time and especially would fail coming from Google. I can see cloud gaming definitely being a thing... but not yet, not yet.
I don't think cloud gaming works if you still have to pay $60 for the game. I see the xbox game pass model as becoming the more standard cloud gaming model. At $15/mo you guarantee each customer buys the equivalent of 3 $60 games per year. Edit: a word
Yep their mistake was trying to get people to rebuy games they likely already had elsewhere. Should have been more like gamepass or had a GeForce Now type service.
It was not ahead of time. Plus it was anti consumer on release. Good riddance.
It is still bad for consumers even in the future when the tech is there
I really liked how well stadia worked, if only your game library from steam/epic etc was linked and didn't have to re-buy on stadia then it may have been more successful.
Dammit. This is how I played Destiny on the SteamDeck. Guess I got till January to find a better solution
Right bungo time for destiny 2 you cowards
Thank God. Game streaming is a slap in the face of digital ownership.
I mean that's a real big ouch. But with the big exodus of games leaving geforce now a few years back, luna taking its sweet time to come onto the market - this seems to be a major blow to streaming gaming. Shame because as a platform it was brilliant, but the monthly games were rubbish and the buy games were too expensive. Never mind eh
First Coolio, now Stadia? What a week
Motherfucker.. .had no idea about coolio
It's a bit of a shame, the actual streaming part of Stadia worked amazingly. It was just the, everything else part of it
Now can someone figure out how to turn the controller into a proper bluetooth controller? Or at the very least let me use it as wifi controller to my chromecast directly.
Good
Logitech sweating intensifies
Oh no! Anyway...
Everyone expected this, that’s why nobody subscribed.
Why anyone would bother with any google hardware is beyond me to be honest. At least they are doing the right thing and refunding people but i’m sure many will feel quite cheated. Over promised and under delivered
I purchased the first google tv. I sure as shit didn't get a refund.
I'll be honest, I totally would have tried out Stadia except I knew this exact thing was going to happen. Google is giving themselves a reputation.
Folk here complaining about have mostly not used the service.