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Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

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Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#441

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

engineeringwoke wrote: post #375
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google/Facebook/Twitter obviously run the "$10 from 100M sales" model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong. That isn't necessary though - other companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP also have tens of millions - to billions - of customers all with their own support requirements: the solution is simple…

> the solution is simple: make the customer put up their own money as collateral for getting to speak to a human. Maybe a company at a certain scale should have a legal requirement to get a person on the phone for any support issue, full stop. All these companies will continue the race to the bottom unless you twist their arm. For PR, sounds like a nice job creator to me!

> Maybe a company at a certain scale should have a legal requirement to get a person on the phone for any support issue, full stop.

For any support issue? Given the realities of running a business over the Internet today, that would be a waste of resources and needlessly expensive.

But I do agree with you in principle though: I think there should be a legal requirement that anyone with a dependent business relationship to a service provider should be legally entitled to human review of any automatic suspension decisions within a single business day. This shouldn't affect long-tail businesses because when there's a strong dependency relationship there's definitely large amounts of money exchanging hands - from which presumably a small fraction would pay for the requisite support costs.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#442

Post by kevingadd »

suction wrote: post #361

I just can't imagine that this has happened completely "without reason" as he states. The reason might be silly, erroneous (whether human or AI), or dumb, but it exists. If Google has no procedure in place to investigate these bans on request, then Google is evil. But by the sound of this I get the feeling that this guy is leaving out some facts.

Not hard to do some Google searches to find lots of examples where people were banned by Google without reason or explanation. Sure, a reason might exist, but if it's impossible to get anyone to tell you what it is, then how can you tell? In at least one high profile case a Google employee's spouse was banned and it was still impossible to get an explanation or reversal!

You can assume that a high-profile game developer in a business partnership with Google is evil and got up to some sort of large scale malfeasance with their gmail account (why??? for what purpose? why would you risk a business deal to do this? what's the upside?) and then Google decided to ban them but not expose them for their misconduct. Or you can go "huh it sure seems like something bad happened to this person and he's not getting an explanation for it."

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#443

Post by dkersten »

jug wrote: post #55

This makes me anxious about my long time Gmail address. Back then I got it just because it and Google was cool, and their services had a good reputation. It was a different Google back then. If they had launched it this year I would never have got one because chances are it would have been cancelled by 2025. Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google. And it's not that hard to replac…

I moved away from google a few years ago after putting it off for years because it sounded like effort. It turned out to be rather straightforward.

I still have my google accounts, I just don’t use them (except YouTube unfortunately). My gmail still forwards to my new address, but I mostly just get emails where people got their own addresses wrong nowadays.

What I did was: I registered a domain name from a company that i don’t use for anything else besides domain names (incidentally a local registrar who I trust and can call on the phone). I then set up a new email address (I use fastmail) using that domain name. Then I forwarded all my old emails to this new address.

If someone emailed my old address, I would always reply from my new one, which slowly updated peoples address books. If I got newsletters, I would either unsubscribe and resubscribe from my new one or just unsubscribe. I did that very slowly and it took a year or so before I stopped getting any forwarded, but there’s no rush. Don’t think “oh I have to update everything at once”. Similarly, I updated services that I still use that used the old email to log in on a case by case basis as I used them.

You can ditch google and it’s not as hard as it sounds!

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#444

Post by geofft »

ryanbrunner wrote: post #410
nvahalik wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies I get where you're going, but I think far more costly to them and advantageous for us is to simply show them that they are unnecessary. If we can drop them so easily, they can't pull stuff like this anymore. It is possible to drop Google and Facebook. They do this stuff because people _need_ the…

What's stopping the next Google from doing the same? Providing poor justification for bans and removal from platforms is by no means limited to the big companies - it's endemic throughout tech - we just hear about Google and Facebook more because they're higher visibility and are considered more essential.

Antitrust regulation.

Seriously, the only reason Google is unaccountable is its scale. Otherwise "Google but with customer support" would be an obvious market opportunity. And the only reason losing your Google account is so impactful is that it controls everything from access to apps on your phone to your email to your calendar to being able to chat with friends. It's theoretically possible to vote with your wallet against Google, but far harder than against, say, Chick-fil-A, which means no boycott gets further than an HN comment.

No startup can compete with Google for those services because Google can artificially offer them for free, and for very high quality, because it's all funded by their advertising business. (Not to mention that a startup would have to "do things that don't scale" and offer real customer support... which also costs money.)

It's not a fair market at that point - you can't say Google is surviving because they offer the best value to customers, simply because the value is so disconnected from the service being offered. And in the other direction, potential customers like me who mostly avoid Google are still "paying" for it in that we're still seeing (and being tracked by) Google ads.

Every incentive mechanism behind the underlying assumptions of a market-based economy - that companies that provide more value are more likely to succeed in the market - is completely broken when you allow trusts like Alphabet to exist.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#445

Post by gnud »

theshrike79 wrote: post #167
jug wrote: post #55

This makes me anxious about my long time Gmail address. Back then I got it just because it and Google was cool, and their services had a good reputation. It was a different Google back then. If they had launched it this year I would never have got one because chances are it would have been cancelled by 2025. Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google. And it's not that hard to replac…

Start the process of getting out right now. Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product. I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since 1995. [1] http://www.iki.fi/

I've had an email on a personal domain for years.

But I still use my old gmail for one thing: Point of contact for the my domain registrar. Do you have any suggestions for how I can solve this?

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#446

Post by Yizahi »

comeonseriously wrote: post #378
_qulr wrote: post #285

It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies. At the very least, companies must be legally required to present you in writing with the so-called violation of terms they're accusing you of, evidence of the violation, and a phone # or other immediate contact so that you can dispute the accusations. It's insane that these basic legal rights don…

>It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights"... Maybe? But I worry that politicians will use that as a tool. Look what DeSantis is trying down here in Florida. He wants to fine "Big Tech" for banning politicians during an election. Personally, I'm tired of the lies and provocations and hate speech of some politicians and I don't think any company should be compelled to share those mess…

So those evil politicians will do what? Force corporations to indiscriminately ban arbitrary people without possibility of appeal? Oh, wait a minute...

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#447

Post by bogwog »

detritus wrote: post #344

As an aside - what benefit is there to having a game such as Terraria on Stadia in the first place? It has fairly low system requirements, and given how much energy is eaten up by server-side rendering and streaming, it seems wasteful in this context.

Gamers don't care about the tech that's being used, they only care about playing good games. If you're a Stadia user, why wouldn't you want to play Terraria? Because it's not a good use of streaming? But it's an awesome game!

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#448

Post by notyourday »

p_l wrote: post #396
amirhirsch wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you imagine any serious new project starting on Google Cloud with their lack of human support? I wonder if Google knows this is why they will never compete with Azure or AWS.

GCP is the only Google service where I regularly, easily, got humans to take up my problem. Once including waking up people in Mountain View on weekend.

Why on earth would anyone want to rely on GCP if Google's executives have constantly been demonstrating that they do not give a shit?

Yes, it is the problem of Google executives, not of "Google". Fish rots from the head. Google has rotten upper management. That's why the middle management runs like drunk frat boys allowing for this kind of behavior downstream.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#449

Post by sf_rob »

pedrogpimenta wrote: post #11
arnaudsm wrote: post #4

As usual, some Googler browsing HN will reactivate his account, everyone will forget and Google won't change a thing to his unbanning process.

Hopefully, more devs will do what this dev is (said to be) doing. > Consider it burned. #Terraria for @GoogleStadia is canceled. My company will no longer support any of your platforms moving forward. Of course, it's very difficult for small devs to do this. It takes an already solid business to be able to stand up like this. As always, I think this is the only way for Google to change, but I don't think it can happe…

Agreed about small devs, but other small devs also have to make countless decisions about which platforms/products to use for their app/platform/website. At the very least, Google should be worried that a good tie-breaker is "Is it a Google platform?".

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#450

Post by kevingadd »

delecti wrote: post #435
kg wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The catch is that having a Google Account is free. Whether or not you made Play Store purchases isn't relevant to the people who handle accounts or (for example) automated gmail bans. And as it happens, if the gmail team decides to ban you, it cascades to the services where you spent money.

That's conjecture though. You don't know which team decided to ban him. You don't know whether he pays for a G Suites, or expanded Drive storage.

We can't possibly know, but the point is there are a bunch of free services and bans generally cascade. If Google provides an explanation we can conclusively answer this, but as is anyone using Google services is probably getting some of it for free.
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