What will happen to all the "purchases" people made?

My immediate thought when Stadia was announced was "I'm never buying games at full price from Google if they are dependent on a service not being cancelled"

I think the service is amazing and I even pay for GeforceNow and did a Stadia trial. There's no way I was going to spend a dime on content or hardware. It was just too likey to be killed off. By contrast I've spent tons of money on Steam and Oculus stores, so I have no problem buying digital content from a company I have confidence in. Google has seriously hurt their brand and I am always concerned they're going to pull the rug out from me on the ancillary G products I use. Many companies sunset products, but Google has an absolute knack for destroying my consumer confidence.

This is the whole reason why I absolutely refused to buy a single game on Stadia while I was subscribed. I simply redeemed my free games every month. I was willing to pay $9 every month or whatever and get a couple of games that may or may not have been worth that much, but no way am I dropping $60 on a game when I know the entire service might disappear next year (given Google's track record).

Same - if it were a subscription service I may have tried it out. But knowing how these digital services tend to go and how quickly Google kills its services I was never going to “buy” a game from them.

At this point, I'm worried that the service wont be around for when my pre-order of baldur's gate 3 goes live.

I'm a stadia subscriber, so I've been hearing this forever. It may be true, but given the number of games they've launched recently, the Stadia Makers program, etc. it seems they're chugging along just fine.

FWIW, I do expect Stadia to be canned at some point, I just don't think it's in the next year or two.