Stadia Customers Will Receive Refunds, But What About Their Game Save Data?
Google deciding to refund all Stadia hardware and software purchases was the right thing to do, but some gamers are really upset because they are still going to lose their save data when the game streaming service shuts down.
As GamesRadar reports(Opens in a new window), one Canadian gamer who goes by the handle Colour on Twitter and YouTube, is pleading with Rockstar to allow a one-time character transfer for Red Dead Redemption 2. Colour has good reason to ask because he's logged nearly 6,000 hours playing the game on Google's service (and still has a lot of trophies left to collect). If a transfer doesn't happen, all of his progress will be lost.
After announcing the Stadia service is shutting down, Google said customers can continue to access their games library until Jan. 18 next year. In total, there are 290 titles available to play on Stadia, and all will have save data associated with them for each player.
Although Colour is clearly an outlier after having logged so many hours in a single game, there will be other Stadia users who are upset over the prospect of losing tens or hundreds of hours of progress in one or more titles.
If Google did offer a way to backup and export the save data, performing the transfer to another version of the game would require the publisher and developer of each title to allow it to happen. That's going to require some work, which seems unlikely to happen given there are hundreds of games and only three months until Stadia is no more. For now, the only option to at least ensure the data is saved beyond Jan. 18 is the Google Takeout service(Opens in a new window), which does support Stadia data backups.
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