This is exactly how Google needed to handle this situation, and they need to be praised for it! The shutdown of Stadia was completely predictable, but I am overwhelmingly surprised at them providing refunds to users for games & hardware and going the extra mile to ensure the hardware is not immediate waste.
As the cryptkeeper over at Killed by Google, I'm very happy with the outcome for Stadia users (myself included). However, I don't think this will move the needle of Google's 'killer' reputation as much as people think given all the skepticism about how long this product would last in the first place. The "death pool," and the people who voted basically predicted the timeline within a few days[1].
The irony is, if Google had made their plan for how to handle end-of-life for Stadia clear from the beginning, they might have got a lot more users.
I'm not sure if their strategy ever changed along the way, but when Stadia was first announced, it was a purely cloud gaming platform where you still needed to buy a license for every game. Not knowing what would happen to my purchased games was the main thing keeping me from trying Stadia - I'd have been happy to use it if it was a Netflix / Xbox Game Pass style service where you pay a flat monthly rate for access to a library, or if it was clear that any games you bought would be refunded if the service suddenly shut down.
As it was though, it seemed as though you could drop a ton of money on Stadia games, and Google might pull the plug the very next day, and you lose everything you just purchased. That worry was the deciding factor for me to never give Stadia a go.
Stadia required custom development work from game developers, my guess is that getting them on board was at least as challenging as getting consumers. It's a risk to tell developers "we're already thinking of how to kill this platform that you're investing in".
It's problematic for a company if they have to announce their EOL plans on product announcement to get interest from customers. Might as well not exist as a company at that point
It's problematic for a company to have EOL plans not because people will assume they will go out of business, but because they might not be able to actually adhere to those EOL plans resulting in a much larger mess than what would have happened if they stayed silent.
It's bad, but I'm not sure it's that bad. In B2B land, loads of contracts have a code-in-escrow clause just in case key people die or the company goes under. One of the key attractions of Open Source is that if the people building it die or don't want to support the tool anymore, you can keep going yourself.
call me cynical but I strongly suspect that rather than behaving honourably, or even thinking of future customer behaviour, Google are trying to evade a class-action lawsuit
the reason that this time they’ve seemingly turned a new leaf is that this time hardware is involved. once something is in someone’s hands and they actually own it, rather than a legally slippery software license or user agreement, you’re looking at something that can be very easily explained to a judge or jury
Strong disagree. For many weeks users have been thinking their controllers are garbage. They might still be. Let's see how well it works. Even if there's compensation I don't like to see stuff that's defective by design. https://www.defectivebydesign.org/
As the cryptkeeper over at Killed by Google, I'm very happy with the outcome for Stadia users (myself included). However, I don't think this will move the needle of Google's 'killer' reputation as much as people think given all the skepticism about how long this product would last in the first place. The "death pool," and the people who voted basically predicted the timeline within a few days[1].
1. https://whenwillgooglekillstadia.com