Google Stadia Hardware Refunds Will Be Issued Within Two Weeks

Google will be issuing refunds for Stadia hardware purchased from the Google Store within two weeks, according to an email sent to customers on Wednesday. The Verge reports: That means the refunds should arrive well ahead of the cloud gaming service's impending January 18th shutdown. Purchases of the Stadia controller, the Founder's Edition, the Premiere Edition, and Play and Watch with Google TV packages are all eligible for refunds, according to Google's Stadia shutdown FAQ.

At the time of the shutdown announcement, Google committed to refunding hardware and software purchases, and it began software refunds earlier this month. Once your hardware refund has been issued, you'll get an email confirmation, Google said in Wednesday's email. Google expects the "majority" of Stadia refunds to be processed by the January 18th shutdown date.

One day...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google will stick with a product for more than 5 minutes, and then it'll succeed, and they'll be like "Oh right, so success isn't always instant? Shit, if only we'd known this 15 years ago we wouldn't have pissed literally billions away getting nowhere".

Re:

[Luckyo]

Alternatively, one day google will actually be able to make a successful mass market product again.

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[alvinrod]

I'm skeptical. Few companies that grow this large ever manage to create something as big or successful as their original invention. First it's just hard to not only come up with a killer idea, but to execute on it well and the companies that fail to do it once don't get to stick around to try again and again. However, large companies face this temptation of trying to make some new great idea incorporate their last big idea or they hobble it in ways where it might compete with what they already do.

Even if

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[drinkypoo]

Microsoft had smart phones well before Android or Apple were close to release. They sucked because someone decided they had to run Windows and that meant a god damn start button.

Windows phone users loved it, in the last incarnation anyway. They sucked because Microsoft changed the API for making apps three times in a very short period, so there were no apps. Ironically, a big part of how Microsoft came to power in the first place was making things easy for developers. What fucking idiots. But it had nothing to do with the interface. In fact, at the time when Microsoft added a start menu to the phone, it wasn't even running Windows yet, it was running wince. You clearly aren't famil

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[fermion]

Landfills full of zune and google glass and now stadia. At least there were some useful time before extinction.

Do they still sell it?

[Opportunist]

I mean ... they don't expect you to send it back when they refund it, right?

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[RevRagnarok]

And a mid-range ChromeCast as well as the USB-C gamepad for Steam.

Tax Write-Off?

[NoWayNoShapeNoForm]

Perhaps the Google policy of starting up so much stuff that they ultimately shutdown has to do with tax write-offs?

Maybe Google is reclassifying the expenses of these failed products as R & D Expense on their corporate tax returns.

Hey look, everyone got refunds

[lexman098]

This is bad business for Google of course, but it proves wrong anyone who was skeptical of buying games/hardware for Stadia thinking Google would just shut it down one day. They did (of course), but if you bought in then you essentially got a bunch of cloud gaming time for free.