Nearly two months have passed since Google announced the closure of Stadia, its cloud gaming service that was born with very good intentions, but due to a combination of circumstances never took off. And it is true that the service worked quite well (and I am speaking here from my own experience) if you had a good connection, and that it had some very interesting offers, such as the one that allowed you to buy Cyberpunk 2077 and obtain, for free, the Bluetooth remote control for the platform and a Chromecast. Everything, for the starting price of the game.
Improvable communication, a catalog that did not grow sufficiently and some difficult-to-understand decisions, together with the strong competition from GeForce NOW, Xbox Cloud and Amazon Luna, condemned Stadia to ostracism and, as an inevitable consequence (remember that Google his pulse does not tremble when deciding to close any service), to his disappearance. A few months before, they were striving to affirm that this was not going to happen, but in the end reality ended up imposing itself.
The good news, while the closure of the service is bad news, is that Google decided to do things right, giving a window of time from the announcement to the closure and refunding all user purchases on the service, even those of those users who no longer have an account in the service, provided that they can prove said purchases with certain data from said operations. The refunds began two weeks ago and, in my personal case, I can confirm that I have already received in my bank account the money that I paid, at the time, for the Cyberpunk 2077 pack and for Terraria, the two purchases I had made in Stadia.
The only exception, when it comes to refunds, is that these would not occur with subscriptions to Stadia Pro, the version of the service that includes a library of games that you can access while you are a subscriber, in the style of Xbox Cloud. We already raised it at the time and it is quite logical, since these quotas have provided access to a service and, therefore, are understood as enjoyed. If any other service closes its doors, it would not make sense to claim for its usage fees until now. It is different with the purchase of games and hardware.
However, and as we can read in Gizmodo, there must have been some failure in the procedures and, consequently, Google has returned to some users the money paid for their subscriptions to Stadia Pro. It doesn’t appear, at least for now, that there are too many cases, and those identified so far have mainly taken place in the UK, but as the refund process is still in its infancy, it is possible that they have occurred or are They will produce more cases, although surely Google will already be working to find out the reason for this failure so that it does not happen again.
The good news for those users who have received these unexpected refunds is that Google has confirmed that they will not be asked to return the money, assuming in this way that it is their responsibility and that, therefore, they must bear the costs of the error. Thus, once again we find ourselves with a decision that deserves to be valued positively, since it could also have acted in the opposite direction, trying to recover the money from those erroneous refunds.
