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.
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.
