When Google announced the shutdown of Stadia, its cloud gaming service, it promised something very few have done in the history of the industry: return the money to everyone involved.
[Cómo conseguir la devolución del dinero en Google Stadia, y cómo salvar las partidas guardadas]
It doesn’t matter if you bought a game or a controller to play on Stadia, Google will give you a full refund, which is really rare in the industry and probably no other company can afford it. This is the positive point of a project that was born with his announced death.
Google owes you money
As announced, starting today, November 9, Google will send an email to all users who have made a Stadia-related purchase at any time; The amount that will be returned will be confirmed in the message. It is important that we keep active the same payment method that we made on the day, so that the return can be made without problems; something important, for example, if we have disabled the card we are using.
Specifically, Google will refund money for the following purchases:
- game purchases
- Purchasing expansions and DLCs
- Hardware purchases such as the Stadia Controller made through the Google Store.
In exchange, Google won’t refund Stadia Pro subscription money. And if we bought the Stadia controller from third-party stores, we will have to go there to request a refund. All in all, it’s a very generous plan, considering that in most cases users are on their own.
Google will first focus on refunding software purchases made from the Stadia store, then move on to hardware purchases like the controller; however, the company was unable to give a specific date for the latter.
The refund process is fully automatic and we have nothing to do. If we have made less than 20 purchases on Stadia, we will receive an email for each purchase made; while users who have made more than 21 purchases will receive a single email detailing all transactions.
Another easy way to know the status of the return is to access the Google Pay activity with our Google account, since it should appear in the list of transactions. Google expects all refunds to be made by January 18, 2023, which will also be Stadia’s last day before it closes for good; although some functions such as the store have already been disabled.
