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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

#961
post #528

I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives are aligned to solve technical problems. No one wants to work on something unless it is technically interesting and new. There is no incentive at all for delivering an excellent user experience over the long term - which usually can't be done with tech only, and involves a lot of dredge work of…

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…

The problem with Stadia is that it's a platform geared for AAA games, but doesn't provide much value for them. It can provide good value for more casual games/gamers, but Google's ego means the service isn't geared for casuals.

When I write Stadia doesn't provide much value for AAA games, we need to look at it from both the gamer and the dev side. For gamers, if money was no object, one is better off with either a decked-out PC (better performance) or a console (wider variety). Stadia's main advantage is potentially being cheaper - which is precisely the gaming crowd which doesn't attract AAA gamedev companies.

For AAA developers, they need to port their game to a different API, then pay the Google tax, in order to appear on a small platform whose users are often drawn in by being cheap and are less likely to pay for your product.

There's no technical advantage for AAA - now that Google has closed their studios, nobody will try to make features that are only possible in cloud gaming in Stadia. If Google couldn't, can you? What happens when you ran into a problem, can you handle Google "support"?

Stadia could be good for casuals. Except it doesn't have any good discoverability features or even a search bar. Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't need discoverability, but indies or anyone searching for them really do. Its payment model (direct 'purchase', no gamepass) is OK for AAA, but not as a good for casuals. And of course, one still needs to port the game which can be difficult and relatively expensive for indies (Luna is just a VM by comparison).

Google could make Stadia better for casuals, but that means doing something less prestigious, no Google engineer will go for that, and they obviously don't understand the business model.

So Stadia is geared for AAA games/gamers, but doesn't provide good features for AAA, and even Google itself couldn't manage to make cloud-gaming-only features. Stadia can be useful for casual gaming, but the platform just isn't geared for that, and Google is unlikely to change that. Likely result is cancellation within a few years.

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

#962

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…

>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. Doesn't matter. If you're dealing with billions of accounts then you're earning billions of dollars. Just hire more people. Scale must never be an excuse for poor customer service.

It depends on the unit economics.

Google has billions of accounts because it is FREE create them. Which could mean the cost of providing human support is actually too expensive on a per unit basis. The only way to rectify these economics is to charge for the account.

I pay for Google One to store more photos...however I have no clue if this improves my situation. Does the algorithm give me more slack for being a long, paid user? Do I get real customer support in the event I do get flagged? No clue.

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

#963
post #29
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.

Or the @GoogleStadia Twitter account will forward this to someone who knows about it. The Stadia Twitter account is uncharacteristically active on customer support for a Google product.

This is probably because in the beginning they want publicity.

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

#964

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no excuse for the laziness/ambiguity surrounding bans like this. I have witnessed, in 1 degree of separation, 3 separate Facebook business account bans in the last 12 months alone - the only reason cited is "you violated our community policy" with a link to the entire community policy and 0 clarification before or after requesting review. In 2 of those cases, they were high-6 & low-7 figure follower companie…

Is there any context on what attempts have been made by this developer to reach Google and what the results have been? The tweet provides very little context other than the fact that it's been 3 weeks. What paths did they take to contact Google? Did they receive any answers?

I don't think it really matters - they intentionally leave no ways of getting to a human or even getting to a system that can help.

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

#965
post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd bet Amazon has more retail customers trying to get disputes resolved, than Google has business customers attempting to do the same, yet Amazon manages to get a human on the other end of the line. And I'd bet that Amazon's disputes have far less monetary value per incident. Maybe apples to oranges, but it's impressive from a customer service perspective.

Yeah I have been pleasantly surprised with how good Amazon's customer support is. In contrast I've had a Google wifi and home device stop working on me, and it was nearly impossible to get in touch with a customer support rep from Google. At this point, I refuse to purchase Google device because I don't know what to do if I have a problem with it.

I tried to contact nest to order a replacement plug/harness (for a 1 year old $150 smoke detector...) and after getting run around for 10+ emails I was finally told "sorry we can't supply that part" and you're shit out of luck.

The cumulative time if took them to read and answer all of those emails (and cost) was definitely double that of just shipping the $1 part.

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

#966
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…

> no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users Who cares? No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?" And that doesn't even delve into lesser systems (like the ability to use public transport, drivers licenses, bad landlords, restaurants & food poisioning, etc…

> No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?"

Sadly we are applying exactly this approach to our criminal justice system.

90+%[0][1] (94% of convictions at the state level, 97% at the federal level) of cases go through plea bargaining and never reach a courtroom. Trials are often impossible for poor defendants because public defenders can only bring a fraction of their cases to trial.

People like Shanta Sweatt[0] plead guilty because the alternative is to face a much longer potential sentence at trial.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-bec...

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

#967
post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People at Google really do want to fix this... But it's a minefield of: * Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.) * Internal Politics (eg. one team has found this account DoSing their service, while the account is perfectly normal in all other ways, but due to Googles systems being so complex a single-s…

I'm no expert on Google and I don't have a PhD but from my time working there (and my time working at other internet services companies), multiple of your assertions here are false or absurd. Child porn detection and enforcement literally does not work that way. I'm not sure how you even think that would work. How do you think the algorithm gets trained? Humans feed data into it. All the major social media companies…

> If you've ever done any automation or browsed on a shared network you've probably seen Google Search throw up the 'automated traffic' warning and block you for a bit.

Normally that happens to me when I start to adjust my query to get Google to do what it used to do.

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

#968
post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Counter-example - Amazon. You can reach someone at Amazon and they are ginormous too.

Counter-counter example, even if you do reach someone at Amazon they're not necessarily going to do anything useful.

I've had a problem with my Amazon account for years now, after Amazon billed me (on my seller account) for something they shouldn't have.

After I complained, they agreed to refund it. Except the refund never arrived.

Asked many times over the years "WTF?", and someone always promises to look into it after agreeing they can see the problem.

Never to be heard from again. Same pattern has happened every single time (many times). Obviously, something about it puts it in the "too hard" basket... :/

Needless to say, I don't use Amazon's services much at all any more unless required for job purposes. And I steer people away from AWS for the same reason too.

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

#969

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Any thoughts on getting your own domain and then still using gmail for receive email on that domain?

I actually have my @gmail.com address redirect to Fastmail, I have a filter on the Fastmail inbox that shows me mail sent to the gmail address.

I go through the filter every now and then to see which services are still using my old address and change them to use the newer one.

It's also a nice way to find out how horribly some services have f-d up the change process. One had a non-working change email button and the CS rep just deleted my old account and told me to create a new one.

One just plain doesn't let people change their email. At all.

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

#970
I've been thinking about migration out of G* for a while already and this post was a breaking point to start the migration. Thank you!

I've purchased personal domain with my country code and picked Fastmail as provided for now (since many folks here gave good feedback).

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