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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

#871

Post by pjmlp »

brundolf wrote: post #726
ryandrake wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The narrow "want to play games on my mac" problem could be solved if game developers chose to build the game cross-platform from the start and release a mac build. Many games are already cross-platform, as they run on both Windows and consoles. The fact that so many game companies don't even bother with a mac build shows they don't want to solve this for whatever reason (probably mac just not profitable enough). If a…

Doing a Mac build from Unreal or Unity is generally easy (and most of the smaller games that use those engines do release Mac builds); doing a Mac build from an in-house engine may be a ton of work But more importantly: Mac hardware usually isn't really equipped for high-end games. If you have a pro-tier machine you might do okay, but nobody buys Macs for gaming, at the very least. It's just too niche of a market to…

Still has a bigger market share than Linux, with people that actually pay for games, and all major engines support Metal.

Whereas GNU/Linux, even with the massive amount of games targeting Android, hardly gets to see them.

Same applies to Stadia, which is mostly GNU/Linux + Vulkan, with Google sponsoring Unity and Unreal as well.

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

#872

Post by nathanyz »

jes5199 wrote: post #692
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…

my friend at Google reported almost exactly that: it's an amazing technical achievement, really pushes the cutting edge of what's possible. And the sales and marketing have no idea how to do anything with it.

Stadia works amazingly well which was actually surprising. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 in 4k with just a controller and Chromecast stick is frankly amazing.

Consoles are great if you play enough, but I found that every time I could squeeze an hour here or there to play, the Xbox needed to update yet again for 20 minutes, and by then something else has come up and I am out.

Stadia lets you jump in and out, no updates as far as I have seen, and just magically works.

Disclaimer: I don't work for Google or any of the game studios and was actually skeptical they could solve the latency challenge.

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

#873

Post by wmf »

esja wrote: post #760
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #734

If you've got an automated vetting process with a 99.999% success rate, but are dealing with billions of accounts, that's still tens of thousands of false positives. At that level, "percentage" is an insufficient measure. You want "permillionage", or maybe more colloquially "DPM" for "Defects Per Million" or even "DPB". You'll still get false positives though, so you provide an appeal process. But what's to prevent t…

The lesson here is: you are too big. If you were smaller, you could manage these issues. But you choose to be big instead.

Is this really true? If Gmail was replaced with a dozen competing services each with "only" 100M users each, would the total number of moderators be lower? How does the number of required human moderators per million users scale, and why?

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

#874

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

seankimdesign wrote: post #863
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #734

If you've got an automated vetting process with a 99.999% success rate, but are dealing with billions of accounts, that's still tens of thousands of false positives. At that level, "percentage" is an insufficient measure. You want "permillionage", or maybe more colloquially "DPM" for "Defects Per Million" or even "DPB". You'll still get false positives though, so you provide an appeal process. But what's to prevent t…

Can you please elaborate on bad actors absuing the appeals process? Is your point about how everyone will automatically appeal, making it difficult for genuine queries to receive the human attention they need? Or is there another vector of abuse you were thinking of?

That's basically it.

If every action taken against an account by automation is appealed, then the automation becomes worthless.

In gaming forums that are run by the developer, such as the World of Warcraft or League of Legends forums, I have very frequently seen people whining and complaining that their accounts were banned for no reason until a GM or moderator finally pipes in and posts chat logs of the user spamming racial slurs or some other blatant violation of ToS.

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

#875

Post by themacguffinman »

remus wrote: post #684

While I agree with the broader point that there should be avenues for someone who's account is incorrectly closed this article is pretty vapid. There are a lot of examples of individuals who have lost access to their accounts but no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users. If I've got a 1 in 10 million chance of incorrectly losing access to my account that is very different to if there…

I largely agree, but OTOH the degree to which this is a sticking point for many people is an early warning that that this is a serious issue that Google has to solve. This problem will only get worse as Google grows. Yes it's unprecedentedly difficult to solve, but I suspect it'll become increasingly difficult to ignore. Systemic failure on this level is the CEO's job and it's disappointing to see Pichai seemingly fail to do something big about it.

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

#876

Post by odessacubbage »

jes5199 wrote: post #692
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…

my friend at Google reported almost exactly that: it's an amazing technical achievement, really pushes the cutting edge of what's possible. And the sales and marketing have no idea how to do anything with it.

they need an experience that sells the actual upsides of game streaming in the same way that mario 64 sold 3d movement and the analog stick. 'here's popular game except worse' will never be a winnable pitch. even casual users who don't know what latency means will instinctively recognize that all the games just feel kind of shitty to play. you need a tailor made experience where latency is a much more negligible factor.

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

#877

Post by ryandrake »

brundolf wrote: post #726
ryandrake wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The narrow "want to play games on my mac" problem could be solved if game developers chose to build the game cross-platform from the start and release a mac build. Many games are already cross-platform, as they run on both Windows and consoles. The fact that so many game companies don't even bother with a mac build shows they don't want to solve this for whatever reason (probably mac just not profitable enough). If a…

Doing a Mac build from Unreal or Unity is generally easy (and most of the smaller games that use those engines do release Mac builds); doing a Mac build from an in-house engine may be a ton of work But more importantly: Mac hardware usually isn't really equipped for high-end games. If you have a pro-tier machine you might do okay, but nobody buys Macs for gaming, at the very least. It's just too niche of a market to…

> Doing a Mac build from Unreal or Unity is generally easy

You'd think, but a lot of mainstream engine-based games that could "easily" have a mac port never get one, even an unofficial one offered as totally unsupported. Look at Among Us for example. Not by any stretch a high-end game. It runs on Windows, Android, iOS, a bunch of XBoxen, and probably other consoles. I bet the developer could spit out a working native macOS version with the push of a button, but so far hasn't.

Kerbal Space Program is another example. When last I checked, they did have a native mac version, but it was hamstrung in some way--I think it was limited to 32-bit or something.

I can't imagine these examples are actually a huge amount of effort to make happen. As a fan and programmer I'd be willing to do it for free.

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

#878

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

nerfhammer wrote: post #741
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…

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/

Yeah I don't see how nVidia doesn't dominate this market. Their product just makes way more sense.

To even get on Stadia you have to port to their custom Linux distribution, which is a pretty huge ask for most games.

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

#879

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

VRay wrote: post #730
brundolf wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One quick nitpick: The latency in streaming isn't as bad as you'd think Most AAA games already have 200+ ms delays between pressing a button and anything happening on-screen. So there's plenty of room to redesign things to work around that latency in a lot of games (This obviously doesn't apply to high-end play on twitch shooters or fighting games though, those are pretty much screwed when it comes to streaming)

> Most AAA games already have 200+ ms delays between pressing a button and anything happening on-screen

Absolutely false, and I don't know where you got that from.

If there was a game that had that kind of latency between input and reaction, people would notice and the reviews would be horrible.

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

#880

Post by brundolf »

nathanyz wrote: post #872
jes5199 wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my friend at Google reported almost exactly that: it's an amazing technical achievement, really pushes the cutting edge of what's possible. And the sales and marketing have no idea how to do anything with it.

Stadia works amazingly well which was actually surprising. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 in 4k with just a controller and Chromecast stick is frankly amazing. Consoles are great if you play enough, but I found that every time I could squeeze an hour here or there to play, the Xbox needed to update yet again for 20 minutes, and by then something else has come up and I am out. Stadia lets you jump in and out, no updates as fa…

Slightly OT but you deal with the updates issue by leaving it running in rest mode all the time. When something needs updating the console will get a ping, download + install, and go back to sleep. Makes things much easier.
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