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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

#981
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/

I used both. When time came to Play cyberpunk, I went for Stadia.

It runs a lot better (streaming quality, glitches, start-up times) are incredible. Using Stadia in general is a polished (yet basic) experience. In contrast Nvidia very much felt like a hack. Log-in in my steam account, seeing weird window glitches.

I see a lot of comments negative on stadia here,based on bias rather then actual experience. Stadia is nothing short of tech star even with its downsides compare to the rest of the market.

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

#982

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…

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

#983

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If we did that at Microsoft when we were bringing Hotmail under the MS umbrella, DOJ would have ripped the company into 10 pieces

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

#984

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay Apple for my email address, although I’d prefer to run email off my own domain.

Why don't you just do it? It will cost you like one or two coffee a month, but the feeling of security (as in "they won't close my account for nothing") is worth a lot more.

I think AWS dumping Parler shows nobody is above getting dumped.

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

#985
post #961

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…

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 de…

> 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.

There are also many prestigious and lucrative engineering goals at Google that are totally untouchably intractable because money is involved. The Google Play store offers countless examples where graph algorithms and ML could identify the worst behavior for human review. If an established app is deluged by negative reviews, take a look at what’s happening. It’s either become a Trojan horse or a victim of 3rd world scamware competition. The average review for an app does not go from 4.5 stars to 1.5 stars overnight without cause!

Attempting to address this glaring deficiency leads to the following problem: the other engineers who rallied to solve it, in the past, are no longer with Google. Do you like your job? Find a technical problem with no downside, in that case!!!!!!

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

#986
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…

Quite ironic that it's an engineering company and stuff doesn't work how it's supposed to so often. I'm looking at you, Google Cloud :P

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

#987
post #932

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…

Honestly, the answer is to charge people a fee, in order to appeal a ban. A fee that covers the cost of investigating the incident, making it revenue-neutral. This way, Google would have every incentive to investigate thoroughly all appeals, including repeated appeals by the same person. From the user's perspective, it's still a pretty good deal. There's a 99.999% chance that you get to use gmail/youtube/etc for free…

They don't even have to keep the fee of the query is legitimate. They can reimburse it or keep it in the user's wallet when they consider that this was either a false positive or a honest mistake. The cost would be minimal but would deter a lot of people trying to game the system.

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

#988

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a company has so many users that it can't hire enough employees to manually handle the false positives properly, it's too big to exist, and should be broken up.

This is by far the most ridiculous reasoning I’ve seen for a company being too big. Because too many users get restricted from the service unintentionally then the provider is too big?

You have summed it up quite nicely, but I don't see why it's so ridiculous? If the social costs incurred by corporations past a certain size become unacceptable, why shouldn't we, as a society, limit their size? There's no natural right to form an LLC.

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

#989

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a company has so many users that it can't hire enough employees to manually handle the false positives properly, it's too big to exist, and should be broken up.

Why broken up vs users migrating to a competitive service? Seems like a very simple facet to compete on.

It's hard for users to migrate to a competitive service when there's some form of lock-in, which is usually what happens in practice (often through other services offered by the same company).

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

#990

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…

Yours is a thoughtful post and doesn't deserve a quick, dismissive response, so I want to hedge the following just by acknowledging that. I'd say your problems 1-3 can be summarized by saying you don't think there's a market for it. I don't think I agree. The prospective market for it is probably console gamers who want to play PC games that aren't ported to their console. Even CP2077 might be an example of this, bec…

- CP2077 could be viewed as a one time inter-generational fluke, where a project was designed with the ambition of PS5, then half-heartedly fitted into a PS4. Once people get their next gen consoles, this use case probably goes away. Can you imagine a lot more of these CP2077-like scenarios that justify being a Stadia user?

- Stadia will be just as vulnerable to "exclusive content fragmentation" as consoles. Now that they've shuttered their internal studio, they will in fact, be constantly on the defensive in the war of exclusive content.

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