It’s been almost two months 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 came to be. And it’s true that the service worked pretty well (and I’m speaking from personal experience here) 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 get a free Bluetooth remote for the platform and Chromecast. All for the asking price of the game.

Improving communications, a catalog that didn’t grow enough, and some hard-to-understand decisions, along with strong competition from GeForce NOW, Xbox Cloud, and Amazon Luna, condemned Stadia to ostracism and the inevitable consequence (remember, its Google pulse doesn’t quiver when deciding to close any services), to its disappearance. A few months before, they tried to confirm that it wasn’t going to happen, but reality finally forced itself.

The good news, even if the service’s closure is bad news, is that Google decided to do things right, providing a window of time between the announcement and the closure and refunding all users’ purchases on the service, even those users who already have an account on the service provided , that they can prove said purchases with certain data on said operations. The refunds started two weeks ago and in my personal case I can confirm that I have already received in my bank account the money I paid for the Cyberpunk 2077 bundle and for Terraria, the two purchases I made at that time. in the Stadium.

The only exception when it comes to refunds is that they don’t happen for Stadia Pro subscriptions, the version of the service that includes an Xbox Cloud-style library of games you can access while you’re a subscriber. We already raised it then and it is quite logical, because these quotas provide access to the service and are therefore understood as being used. If any other service closes its doors, it would still make no sense to charge for its use. It’s 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 subsequently Google has refunded some users the money they paid for Stadia Pro subscriptions. It doesn’t appear, at least for now, that there have been 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 occurred or will produce more cases, although Google will certainly be working to find out the reason for this failure so that it does not happen again.

The good news for users who received these unexpected refunds is that Google has confirmed it they will not be asked for a refund, assuming that it is their responsibility and that they therefore have to bear the cost of the error. So we find ourselves once again with a decision that deserves to be evaluated positively, because it could have acted in the opposite direction and tried to recover the money from these erroneous refunds.