Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Stadia Shut Down Rumors

Hello,

I am one of the few dozen people that are playing BG3 on Stadia. There are rumors that Stadia will be shutting down at the end of the year. In other words, the Stadia playerbase paid full price for an early access game, the service for which is shutting down before the full release of the game. If this shutdown occurs, is there any way that we could get a credit toward a Steam copy? While I believe paying full price ought to entitle the playerbase to a free Steam version if Stadia shuts down before release, I would also accept a discount that covers the majority of the price.

While Google has a notorious reputation of killing off projects of theirs, this one is probably a false alarm this time around. Recent comment on twitter:



There's also expansion plans for servers into Mexico later this year, so that would be inconsistent with plans of shutting down.

Thank you for the information and confidence. You da mod, Composer.

💖

Just as a side note, even putting aside what Composer just posted, I think in case this scenario should ever materialize Google should be the company people should ask for some sort of compensation (and OH BOY, they can surely afford it), not Larian.

You're right, but I don't think Google has a history of being fair and reasonable to its consumers whose services it shuts down.

The actual responsibility will probably vary by legal juristdiction, andI guess it will remain a grey area until some centralized gaming shopfront goes out of business.

Strictly speaking, Google, Valve, Epic and anything similar act as retailers to sell you digital goods from 3rd parties. The expectation would be that if these companies shut down their shopfronts, you would have - in some form - a copy of the digital goods you have purchased, but with no guarantee of any future updates or customer service

I am less certain what this actually means, since Valve-vended software does not always work without the Steam service existing, and Stadia-vended software is a headless linux binary that would be useless to most people. In those instances, if the game developer is not regarded as the vendor, then consumers are screwed.

Personally, I am more of the opinion that the game developer/publisher is the entity selling the product, with Google/Valve/Epic being a marketing shopfront that takes a cut; this would make it the responsibility of the developer/publisher to provide a copy of the digital goods to the consumer.

All this is different from the pay-per-month-to-access-a-game-library sort of service. There you have no ownership, you are just renting the ability to play games.

That is why you never - ever - pay for digital products; put those deceased presidents towards something you can actually feel.

Another Stadia user here. While I agree that Google should be responsible for compensating customers for their losses if they shut down the service...it wouldn't hurt Larian to offer a free Steam copy (or heavily discounted) to those that lost the game, if Stadia were to shut down.
I mean, we've already purchased the product. It would cost virtually nothing to allow us to have it in a different form. Forcing us to buy it on another platform would be doubling their money due to our misfortune. I don't think any company wants to be seen like that.

I already have it on both platforms. I just prefer Stadia because I have trouble downloading and getting it to play on my computer. Or I used to a couple or three patches ago.

My computer is an i7, but it's a few years old, and I don't want to buy a new one. Or maybe I have some kind of graphics card problem. I don't know. I remember that I had to turn off my nvidia graphics card to be able to play Kingmaker for some reason, and I'm not much of a tech person, so I don't want to go through the hassle of figuring out what the issue is now.

Anyway. I guess I prefer Stadia.

Honestly, as much as I'd love Larian (or Google) reimbursing those who bought BG3 with credit towards a Steam copy when Stadia gets shut down, I'd be slightly more happier if Larian just went and announced that BG3 was gonna come to other game streaming services-particularly Nvidia's Geforce Now platform either immediately at launch or shortly afterwards.

Sure, it'd be nice if I got a Steam key out of all this but I don't have a PC to play on so most of my gaming is done through GFN and considering that Larian's already put DOS 1 and 2 on GFN I'm just out here hoping that they continue to support it and put BG3 there.

(Plus, I seriously prefer GFN to Stadia any day of the week.)

We don't have currently have computers capable of running BG3 either. But if push came to shove and it's the only way we could play it, we would likely bite the bullet and buy a couple. I'd much rather sit on the couch and hit the button on my Stadia controller and fire it up rather than play on PC.

I was going to agree but then looked at the GFN website.
$30/month if you want to play more than 1 hour per session? I haven't used the service before, but I also assume you have to purchase the games as well. Steep...

How about a console release, that would certainly be nice.

I'd be surprised if there wasn't one. Maybe not at launch, tho.