Google yesterday made the least surprising announcement in the recent history of the technology sector: the closure of Stadia, its cloud video game service born between criticism and great skepticism.
[Google Stadia es tan complicado de entender que han tardado un año en explicarlo correctamente]
But neither Stadia was all that bad, and shutting it down won’t be a huge loss either. Google has already announced that the technology it has developed will be used in other services, such as YouTube or web search. And it’s hard to criticize Google when it promised to return the money to all gamers, something truly unheard of in the gaming industry and one that we wish more companies would take into account, especially with games which only work with the Internet.
How to recover money from Stadia
Now, what exactly are we going to receive? Even regular Stadia players may not know how much money they’ve spent on the platform. Fortunately, Google has already explained the steps to ensure the return to all users.
To begin with, the most important thing is that we don’t have to do anything to receive the money
Google will notify us by email with all our account information and exact amount, so we have to be on standby when the time comes if there is any problem.
The only thing we really need to do to get the money back is make sure the payment method we used is still valid. In other words, if we paid with a card at the time, it is important that this card remains valid at the time of reimbursement; otherwise, Google will not be able to complete the transfer. Therefore, it is important to update the payment information in Stadia if, for example, the card has expired or if we have closed the bank account.
How much money will Google give us back
It is important to clarify that Google will only refund the money we have spent on their platform. In other words, if we bought coupons in store, we will have to go to the same establishment to request a refund; this shouldn’t affect many Spanish users, but in some countries it was possible.
The list of purchased items for which Google will refund money is as follows:
- Games purchased on Stadia.
- Game expansions and DLCs.
- Stadia controllers.
- Stadia Founder’s Edition.
- First edition of Stadia.
- Stadia Play and Watch with Google TV.
To find out exactly what you paid for Stadia, the easiest way is to go to Google’s order history and add your Stadia expenses from the list. To this we must add the payments made within the platform, which we can see on the Stadia page.
How to recover saved games
If we have spent many hours playing on Stadia, it is possible that we have a lot of progress that we will lose with the closure of the platform. Unfortunately, for now there is no clear solution to this problem.
The best we can do at this time is to back up our Stadia account data. It’s very simple, just access Google Takeout and select only the Stadia section; Note that you must do this before the service closessince it will now be inaccessible.
At the moment there is not much we can do with this data. This is because the games are saved in the Stadia game’s own format and are not compatible with other platforms. But, in theory at least, it should be possible to convert them somehow.
Therefore, we depend on other companies to decide whether to implement a migration tool, which converts saved games to the type they use.
What about Stadia controllers?
Perhaps the one part of Stadia that gamers have really liked is the controller, which has received a lot of praise for its ergonomics and the feel of its buttons. Which is unfortunate, because these buttons will become clipboards when the service closes, as they only work with Stadia over our network’s Wi-Fi connection.
That is why some users are already asking Google for a solution to continue enjoying commands on other platforms, such as our PC or with our mobile in other games.
While these controllers have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, a firmware update would be required for them to connect to other devices and platforms, and Google is unlikely to want to put as much work into it. a service that ceases operations. Therefore, another alternative is for Google to release the firmware source code for the community to do the work, but so far the company has not said anything about it.
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