Google Stadia is known as one of the greatest flops in gaming history, but the fear around the system was apparently intense for a time.

  • Chozo@fedia.io
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    3 days ago

    you had to pay for both a subscription to use the service and additionally a license to play particular games on the service

    The subscription was optional. If you bought a game on Stadia, you could play that game whenever you wanted.

    Google did refund these purchases when it shut down Stadia, and this was absolutely the right call, but it is also befuddling because, if they had been planning on doing this anyway, they could have told everyone at the beginning and made people a lot less wary of spending money on Stadia!

    They did say that early on. It was in the ToS from Day 1 that in the event of a shutdown, Google would either distribute offline versions of the games to you, or that they would refund you.

    • bitcrafter@programming.dev
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      3 days ago

      Huh, that was not my understanding at the time, but if so then I obviously stand corrected! Thank you for the clarification.

      • Chozo@fedia.io
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        3 days ago

        Yeah, Google was really bad about making these things clear to people. It’s insane to me how an advertising company could be so terrible about advertising the benefits of their own product. Phil Harrison is a fuckin’ gaming Grim Reaper.