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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

#741

Post by nerfhammer »

moksly wrote: post #654
brundolf wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stadia, from day one, has seemed like an engineering-oriented project. It's a cool tech that nobody asked for and not many people actually want (and has been atrociously packaged as an actual product). I can just hear the kickoff meeting: "We have some of the best cloud engineers in the world, we have one of the biggest fleets of data centers. Not a lot of companies could reasonably implement cloud gaming, but I bet…

Are you sure people don’t want it? I think it’s one of the biggest market potentials in gaming right now. I’m quickly approaching 40, and I would like nothing more to not have to own the windows desktop that I only use for one thing. To play blood bowl 2 (and eventually 3) a few times a week. If I could do that from a browser on my MacBook, you can bet I’d never own another desktop in this life. That’s anecdotal or c…

nvidia has a competing service that supports that title, and it honors your steam account instead of needing you to re-buy it

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/games/

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

#742

Post by rsj_hn »

robotresearcher wrote: post #687
bluefirebrand wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter-counterpoint They provide products like gmail for free because it allows them insight into people's communication which they can then leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than they could simply selling email services.

Sure, that's absolutely true. But the margin would be eroded if they provided much better customer service for unpaid Gmail. At some service level, the margin would be negative.

IMO the problem is the dismissive attitude towards human support where it is viewed only as a roadblock to "scale".

Being able to provide good support is a difficult skill to acquire and maintain, and most companies struggle with doing it regardless of how much they spend. You cannot get good support by throwing money at the problem any more than you can get good engineering -- it's a necessary but not sufficent condition. Moreover being able to provide good support requires a customer focus, attention to detail, and focus on quality that was never part of Google's DNA, and which Google prides itself as not caring about. To make Google into even a decent support company that creates as good of a support experience as Amazon (which is years ahead of Google) would require much more than higher margins, it would require a total rework of the corporate culture, leadership team, hiring policies, internal training and communications, etc. That's hard to do at a company that has such a dismissive attitude towards its user base, primarily because historically the real customers are advertisers and users are the product. It's hard to transition to more of an Amazon model where the end users were always the customers and the business was built around that understanding.

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

#743

Post by wwweston »

eldavido wrote: post #735
jennyyang wrote: post #658

We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies. Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly. It's a shadow v…

No! What we need is competition and choice to ensure companies are responsive to what people want. I can't, for the life of me, understand why people think "regulation" will magic away all our problems. Here's what happens: a lengthy political process results in a bunch of laws getting passed. The large companies who have enough skin in the game to care send their lobbyists, who ensure the outcome of the process does…

Complaining about "regulation" in general is as insightful as complaining about code in general, and for pretty much the same reasons.

> What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing called "regulation".

If there isn't competition, how do you plan to get it, short of policy to encourage it (aka regulation)?

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

#744

Post by stalfosknight »

newbie578 wrote: post #646

I just want to know why is no one willing to hold Google and Apple accountable? Why don't journalists from e.g TechCrunch or the Verge confront Sundar point blank and ask him how can stuff like this happen and why is the only solution to blow up on social media?

You could credibly accuse Apple of many things, and I say that as an unashamed Apple fanboy. But making it basically impossible to reach a real human being by phone via AppleCare, or in person at your local Genius Bar if you prefer, is not one of them.

You get what you pay for.

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

#745

Post by vkou »

newswasboring wrote: post #452
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…

> It is possible to drop Google and Facebook. Its also possible to live without electricity and running water. This disproportionate power model doesn't work there because some people implemented regulations on them. I am beginning to suspect we need similar laws for this.

If you are equating a world without Facebook to a world without running water, you need to spend a week camping, where you leave your phone at home.

You'll very quickly discover why they are not at all alike.

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

#746

Post by eldavido »

esja wrote: post #740
eldavido wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No! What we need is competition and choice to ensure companies are responsive to what people want. I can't, for the life of me, understand why people think "regulation" will magic away all our problems. Here's what happens: a lengthy political process results in a bunch of laws getting passed. The large companies who have enough skin in the game to care send their lobbyists, who ensure the outcome of the process does…

Why not both? They aren't mutually exclusive.

You're probably right.

More active antitrust may need to occur via regulation.

I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called "regulation" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.

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

#747

Post by dleslie »

eldavido wrote: post #735
jennyyang wrote: post #658

We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies. Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly. It's a shadow v…

No! What we need is competition and choice to ensure companies are responsive to what people want. I can't, for the life of me, understand why people think "regulation" will magic away all our problems. Here's what happens: a lengthy political process results in a bunch of laws getting passed. The large companies who have enough skin in the game to care send their lobbyists, who ensure the outcome of the process does…

And then the competitors _tacitly_ collude and form an oligopoly, using their combined market power to consume small competitors and collectively reduce product quality.

The unregulated free market makes minnows of us all for the whales to feed upon.

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

#748

Post by newswasboring »

nvahalik wrote: post #706
newswasboring wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is possible to drop Google and Facebook. Its also possible to live without electricity and running water. This disproportionate power model doesn't work there because some people implemented regulations on them. I am beginning to suspect we need similar laws for this.

Yes, but Google and Facebook are not public utilities, nor should they be.

Why not? The qualification being for public utility should be "is this basic infrastructure humans need to live now?". And the answer is yes. Facebook controls most of the big public speaking forums and google controls so much and in so many spaces that it would be foolish for me to even try listing.

I hope in america public utilities are not only controlled by the government. Because where I am from public utilities can be publicly or privately controlled. As long as they are all playing by the same rules many private companies have made lots of money providing public utilities.

I don't see the impediment here.

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

#749

Post by TheJoYo »

brundolf wrote: post #691
moksly wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure people don’t want it? I think it’s one of the biggest market potentials in gaming right now. I’m quickly approaching 40, and I would like nothing more to not have to own the windows desktop that I only use for one thing. To play blood bowl 2 (and eventually 3) a few times a week. If I could do that from a browser on my MacBook, you can bet I’d never own another desktop in this life. That’s anecdotal or c…

I don't think it's impossible that streamed games will find a market, but I think there are several hurdles that (unsurprisingly) weren't apparent to a company with no experience in the industry: 1) PC gamers tend to revel in owning (building, customizing, optimizing) their hardware; not just because it lets them play the games they want to play, but even for its own sake. RGB arrays, overclocking, custom case builds…

You don't need to buy a Stadia controller to play Stadia.

It's free with an optional subscription for games and 4k.

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

#750

Post by bluefirebrand »

gerash wrote: post #736
bluefirebrand wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter-counterpoint They provide products like gmail for free because it allows them insight into people's communication which they can then leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than they could simply selling email services.

I'm all for regulations to avoid these account closures with no recourse. That said, why do people care so much about Google using Gmail data for ad. You either trust Google or not. If you are convinced that random humans won't read your private emails for fun and giggles then why should I care if their regexes or neural networks are fed my emails or my search history? The only downside is if someone is watching your…

> why do people care so much about Google using Gmail data for ad.

What does this have to do with anything I said?

I never made a judgement of it being bad or good. I just pointed out that probably Google isn't providing Gmail as a free service out of any kind of charity

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