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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

#901
post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For counterpoint, they provide products like Gmail for free at point of use because the support costs are very low (amongst other factors). Would you prefer government change this balance by regulation, or let users decide what they want? Many users choose very cheap typical service with a small but real risk of misery. Perhaps it's because they don't understand how miserable it can get. It's important that the bad e…

Would I prefer government enforce food safety standards, or let consumers decide what they want? Would I prefer government enforce building safety codes, or let consumers decide what they want? Would I completely ignore the fact that Google has sucked the air out of the room with their market dominance, so hardly any competitors are left for consumers to decide between?

Let's not forget that any time a competitor starts taking part of their market or becoming successful they just buy them out with an amount of money that is hard for any sane person to turn down.

The WhatsApp founder seems pretty against Facebook and is encouraging and funding Signal. He took money from a company he doesn't believe in or like because who wouldn't. And this is despite him not liking Facebook. So realistically competition is great on paper, but in this case the competition already has such market dominance that any new company that tries will get squashed with a buy-out or other aggressive tactics. So realistically I don't see how competition will do anything.

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

#902

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…

I think this is a balancing act of risks, and I wanted to bring up what I believe to be a success story when it comes to handling suspensions: Microsoft. One thing I believe Microsoft gets right is that suspensions are isolated to the service whose TOS was violated. I.e. violating the hotmail TOS doesn't suspend you from their other services. I think this makes the impact of a false positive less catastrophic, while…

> This may be an artifact of how teams work together at Microsoft.

It may be an artifact of Microsoft actually being regulated for monopolistic practices.

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

#903
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 th…

Thanks for sharing your "phased transition" strategy.

Things aren't all-or-nothing, and taking this sort of approach can definitely help with making such a non-trivial change.

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

#904
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic requirement. Once you have that, the next step could be legislating that there has to be a way to appeal service termination In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation. If you want to get in the details ( action X on date Y violates ToS section Z), that migh…

> In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation. When the ToS are 15 pages long this is about as useful as hearing "You're being arrested for breaking the law" when you're in the back of a cop car. Doesn't really narrow it down and provides you no way of actually defending yourself. I agree that being too specific can help bots but the current way of handling these things is obviously flawed.

> When the ToS are 15 pages long

You're off by at least 1 order of magnitude.

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

#905

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…

Yes there is a lot of money riding on that, but that is the cost of doing business.

Why banks have heavy compliance costs? Doing proper AML and KYC costs money and society decided that it was critical enough to bear that cost even in light regulation countries.

A lot of the financial success of those companies is in part the result of not fully taking responsibility for the consequences of their business activity. Eventually they will, under social pressure that this post success represent, or by laws.

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

#906
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…

I hate doing this, but I feel like I need to pick at each of your described hurdles, because I think each of them make assumptions or assertions that don't hold up.

1. You claim PC gamers do it for the hardware as much as the software. Let's assume the data backs that - it certainly seems like it's likely to be true. And I'm biased in wanting to believe it too, because I like to build and revel in the machines that run the games I own. What isn't true is that those same people, people like me, cannot also be attracted to things like Stadia.

2. Services like Stadia do not replace the many games that people play on the many devices that already exist. It's not a "one or the other" thing. They allow those devices to play more games.

The biggest flaw is in suggesting that casual gamers (a term which is flawed for many other reasons) wouldn't be a potential market for a thing like Stadi. Mobile game sales account for almost half of ALL game related sales. 48%, in fact. $76 billion in sales. A thing like Stadia means that people can play more games on their devices.

And let me say, games on Stadia play incredibly well on my iPad that's a few generations old. That's very attractive. Being able to play PC quality games on my iPad when I travel is worth every penny. I'd even argue it's easier to play games on Stadia than it is to play natively installed games. With Stadia, there's no downloading of the game, no installing, not time wasted waiting for updates. You just turn it on, and it works.

First, where you say "casual gamers", I think what you're trying to say is "people who play games on their mobile devices." You go on to describe the abilities that mobile devices have. While I won't dispute that, one thing I think you're missing is that services like Stadia make it even easier to play games on those devices that don't exist for those devices, or will at some future date, optimized to run on those mobile devices.

I'll probably beat this horse to death, but to compare: I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my iPad through Stadia minutes after it was available. It took nearly a day before I could run it on my PC, and after the first several patches I just stopped bothering. Granted, the game is a beautiful mess, but the point is: it was effortless on the iPad, and has been ever since. Not only that, but I can switch to my iPhone, or to my PC and pick up right where I left off. If I do it quick enough, the game just unpaused when I jump to the new device. And I can travel and still play. There's no way my PC, with its UV reactive liquid cooling is going to travel with me.

3. Stadia starter kit is optional. Stadia is free. Do you have a controller? Keyboard and mouse? A web browser? You're good. There is no required subscription fee. You buy the games, and they cost the same as console games. So yeah, if you have a device that can run modern browsers, you don't need to buy a console.

4. I assume when you mention latency, you mean "input latency" - meaning, the time it takes for the game to react to your button press or mouse movement. There are indeed hard limits to how low input latency can be. The game cannot update its entire model and render it in 0ms. It has to make calculations based on your inputs, then show you what changed. But that's not the only constraint. Consider the entire picture: a target on the screen moves, and you need to shoot it. If you're good, it'll take you about 100ms to react. Most people can't react in less than 150ms. It takes 5-10ms to transmit your reaction over USB. It takes the simulation any number of milliseconds to process and tell the monitor to redraw itself. Let's assume the processing time of the game engine is 0ms. The best monitors will add 2ms to the clock.

So, from your human reaction to the resulting frame, at best, it takes from 107ms to react to something on screen and see the results of your reaction.

And that's on your PC. No networking.

What does Stadia add? On a good connection, it'll add 20-30ms. To be fair, that's what I've seen on my pretty normal cable company internet connection over 5ghz Wifi. With most games, you'd never notice the extra time. Are you going to notice it as a pro gamer playing FPS competitively? Probably.

Your assertion that Stadia will die is about the most right thing you've said. Even with a market, Google tends to kill things seemingly at random. What will help it die quicker is if Nvidia's service is able to outperform Stadia in terms of simplicity and streaming speeds.

But saying streaming based gaming won't find a market reminds me a lot of what the cable companies and Blockbuster used to say about Netflix.

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

#907
Terraria is very very popular game so I wonder what is going on inside Stadia team... could it be that they are just incompetent and they do not even monitor Twitter feeds of popular game developers?

Or maybe Stadia team actually wants to help but they are ignored inside Google? Or they just know the project will be canceled so they don’t care?

Or maybe they really do not want terraria on their platform so they are willing ignore this?

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

#908

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…

It's interesting to me how Bloom Filters avoid the uncanny valley between probably correct and definitely correct. I don't know if this is a technological difference between problem domains or a purely ideology/mindset.

Dividing a problem by 10 should get notice. By 100 (eg, Bloom Filters) respect. By 1000, accolades. Dividing a problem by infinity should be recognized for what it is: a logic error, not an accomplishment.

Most times when I'm trying to learn someone else's process instead of dictating my own, I'm creating lists of situations where the outcomes are not good. When I have a 'class', I run it up the chain, with a counter-proposal of a different solution, which hopefully becomes the new policy. Usually, that new policy has a probationary period, and then it sticks. Unless it's unpopular, and then it gets stuck in permanent probation. I may have to formally justify my recommendation, repeatedly. In the meantime I have a lot of information queued up waiting for a tweak to the decision tree. We don't seem to be mimicking that model with automated systems, which I think is a huge mistake that is now verging on self-inflicted wound.

Perhaps stated another way, classifying a piece of data should result in many more actions than are visible to the customer, and only a few classifications should result in a fully automated action. The rest should be organizing the data in a way to expedite a human intervention, either by priority or bucket. I could have someone spend tuesday afternoons granting final dispensations on credit card fraud, and every morning looking at threats of legal action (priority and bucket).

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

#909

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can argue the domain registrar can take it away from you, but that doesn't happen unless you do something illegal with that domain or don't pay the annual fee. Registrar TOSes are just as opaque as email providers, which just as many case of seemingly irrational domain seizures.

I presume you mean there are cases where registrar's have "seized" a domain. Would be good if you had an example, because I sure can't find one.

Here you are, from last month: https://domainnamewire.com/2021/01/17/godaddy-explains-ar15-...

And by 'seizure', I think it is pretty clear that I mean 'revoking access to', in the same way as in the OP Google has revoked access to the given Google account.

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

#910
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…

The EU recently proposed The Digital Services Act, which is a DCMA like legislation (with both copyright infringement and other illegal content like CP as targets). Part of that draft law pretty clearly states that companies must have a proper appeal process for banned accounts. This would apply to "decisions taken by the online platform on the ground that the information provided by the recipients is illegal content…

> which in practice covers basically all bans except for Age restriction or non-payment based bans.

Google avoid this EU restriction by suspending accounts/app indefinitely instead of banning them.

You can see a Google employee explaining this here : https://github.com/moneytoo/Player/issues/37#issuecomment-76...

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