Stadia support says compensation for delayed activation codes is ‘highly likely’

I’ve had my Stadia Founder’s package for about 24-hours now and someday I really look forward to actually being able to use it. Like many others who purchased Stadia, I have yet to receive the activation code that actually allows me to use Stadia or reserve my username, one of the supposed benefits of being in on the service from the start.

Now we had our concerns with the Stadia at launch, but we didn’t assume that literally just getting activation codes to those that purchased it would be one of those issues.

With a couple of us having now chatted with Google’s dedicated Stadia Team via support and they have reassured us that they’ve “identified an issue where a small fraction of Stadia access codes were sent out of order which has been already addressed.” This is fantastic news, except that I already have the necessary hardware to run Stadia and am still without a code. Our Editor-in-Cheif, Nick Gray, is waiting on his Stadia controller to be delivered today, but he is also waiting on his activation code which should have been emailed to him on Monday. 

According to support, the codes are automated (of course they are) and there is nothing they can do to speed up the process or get users their specific codes. Unfortunately, not even 30 minutes on the Google Store chat support with a Stadia specialist is enough to resolve the issue. The end result is the standard “wait for your activation email” response that others have received.

The lone bright spot for the chat was that the Stadia support team did indicate that it is highly likely that there will be some form of compensation for those who experienced the code delay. Obviously this is to be taken with a grain of salt as this was just a member of the Stadia support team, but it does give us hope that it’s a conversation that is already going on there.

As you can see, they have no information on what that might be, the most likely option, of course, would be an extension to the 3-month trial of Stadia Pro, but time will tell. For the sake of the Stadia support team and Stadia itself Google should address this publicly sooner rather than later as this is not a great introduction to the service for its earliest supporters.