@Mode Ignoring that there aren't enough games currently on Stadia for a full scheduled year of Pro games, I believe it definitely would be worse for people who bought games just before the list was r...
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@Mode Ignoring that there aren't enough games currently on Stadia for a full scheduled year of Pro games, I believe it definitely would be worse for people who bought games just before the list was released only to find out those games are going to be free later on. First, it disincentivizes anyone else from buying the game until its free, making any multi-player functionality that much harder to find others to play with. Second, assuming you're already past the refund time limit now you have up to 12 months to dwell upon and resent that you paid for something that others will get for free instead of it just happening and you getting over it. Third, it disincentivizes people from buying any games at all until they find out what will be on next year's list, I don't want the service to die so this is bad, it needs to make money to be viable. Fourth, for those that bought games, now instead of spreading the complaints out over a year, you're compressing them all into a single day/week, completely overwhelming customer service, and just degrading the general experience for all those using the service. Yes, obviously making your customers unhappy isn't a good business model. Do you think the intent of giving games to Pro members was to make them unhappy? Someone is always going to be unhappy and complain no matter what they do, question is which action is going to make more people happy vs unhappy? Yes, Stadia is a new service but again it also needs to be profitable and realistic. There's a reason other services use similar models, there's only so much you can give away before it becomes unprofitable. As the game library improves so will the free games and the less likely people will buy a game just before it's made available to Pro members. I've had this happen to me on a few other platforms, yes it kinda sucks, but you get over it and move on. Maybe they will find a solution that makes everybody happy and is still profitable but I am not going to hold my breath for perfection. So critiques of your ideas are only valid if a potential solution to the problem is also provided? I already said, I think a $5 credit on your account if you purchased a game in the last month would go a long way to appease people's complaints. Still needs to be profitable though, so maybe that amount is dependent on the amount of time played or timed owned. But I guess that isn't offering solution if its building upon something you had suggested... so sure, I'll humor you and attempt to solve this regardless of how futile it is. There's the option of only giving away games nobody has bought yet. I believe this is what the Epic store does every 2 weeks and then the games become available for purchase afterwards. I don't have numbers for people who actually buy the games after they've been free but I would imagine that it is significantly lower than services that have the games available for purchase before the games are free. Stadia also doesn't really have this option as developers need to spend time porting to the platform and there's no reason for them to port the game just to make it free. I am pretty sure the free games from Epic have already been on the PC for a while so there are no porting costs but I also have dozens of games from them that I'll never realistically play. I'll keep claiming them just because but I've kind of lost interest in the platform since the quality of the free games has just been so meh... people will complain about anything. They could completely change the business model they have, actually make it a Netflix for games and pay developers based on the amount of time users spend playing the games. But then they would have to raise the cost of a Pro subscription which would make lots of people unhappy, I suppose it could be a separate tier but then you'd still have people unhappy about games they bought that are then made free to Pro users, which is what we're trying to solve. You could stop making games free to Pro members and reduce the cost but the precedent has been set and that would really piss off lots of people, they'd claim a "bait and switch" even though the cost is being reduced to compensate. Publishers also likely wouldn't be on board with a Netflix model despite there being evidence, according to OnLive, they can make more money with this model because people will try games they normally wouldn't purchase. I could probably keep going but I think you get the point... it's impossible to make everybody happy but at least it seems like they're trying. I think that's all we can reasonably expect right now. It's a brand new service and from what I've seen they're working harder to make their customers happy than any other platform has at launch. I mean daily timestamped updates about the state of Stadia... does anyone else communicate even remotely this well? No that doesn't mean we should just be content with whatever they give us but let's try to be reasonable and not complain about free games...