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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

Credit to Google, they didn't have to do this. Especially after issuing refunds for hardware already.

This is the most graceful shutdown of a Google product that I've seen in quite a while. Full, automatic refunds for game and hardware purchases, downloads for savegames, and software updates to remove hardware dependence on external servers before they shutdown.

I can't think of much else they could have done to make things smoother for customers, short of not shutting it down at all of course. (And undoubtedly, the fact that they are killing yet another product is inescapable, and doesn't help their reputation for doing that.)

If only they had said beforehand that's going to be their shutdown process they probably wouldn't have had to shut it down..

They did, they always said that they would refund the games if the service shut down, but i guess they didn't make it clear enough, marketing was horrible and onboarding / interface was awful. It's crazy how amazing the service was, but how terrible they handled everything else.

> always said that they would refund the games if the service shut down

Link? I remember lots of people asking about this at launch and I don't remember there being a public statement from Google.

It's amazing to see that, for how good Google is at software engineering, it's horrible at products & follow-through.

Like, look at the ongoing train-wreck that is the messaging (Gtalk/Hangouts/Chat/RCS/...) strategy.

They cleaned up the chat mess, at least. Only Chat and RCS ("Messages") now.

They were asked repeatedly, in several interviews starting from the day they announced it, and they always sidestepped the question entirely. At some points they even framed it as the customer or interviewer being afraid/not ready for the future and other patronising ways of saying "clearly we simply won't ever shut down" instead of answering the question.

Do you have a source for that, that they had said that from the start? This is the first I've heard of it.

> It's crazy how amazing the service was

It wasn't amazing though. GeForce NOW is so much better, at least for me. Higher resolution, more responsive, better selection of titles.

I'm an early adopter of cloud based GPUs. I've tried them all. Inn the last ~6 months GeForce NOW has finally made it so I can play AAA titles seamlessly. I can't tell the difference between local vs. cloud. Your experience may differ if you play competitive online games, but for single player games -- it's replaced any desire I have for a gaming PC.

GFN has the better quality nowadays, but back when they both launched it was pretty similar. However GFN 's UX has always been subpar because their abstraction layer over Windows regularly leaks - I've had Windows crashes which resulted in lost game progress, I've had to reauth, including random password and MFA to game launchers, shortcuts doing the wrong thing on the wrong layer.

No it's not, Geforce now is rubbish and more expensive.

I tried it yesterday and it crashed within 30 seconds after multiple issues and the image quality is far worse than Stadia, it also doesn't have all the nice features Stadia has.

I was using Geforce now when it was beta, but you can tell it's just streaming a PC, where as with Stadia everything was purpose built and worked great from Chrome.

Geforce now sucks compared to Stadia.

Nah. You may be using it wrong.

On the other hand, they made it a WebUSB process instead of a standalone firmware, so when they take this update server down, any further controllers found at a garage-sale or whatever can't be updated.

A cookie for whoever's the first to snarf the firmware in-flight and whip up a standalone updater.

It could also be a way of covering their asses. Big tech ends up in courts all the time these days, I wouldn't be surprised if creating a bunch of e-waste out of 1 to 3-year-old controllers would be brought up at some point

It's not e-waste because the controllers work over USB already.

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