Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked • Hacker News Board

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

#991

Post by horsawlarway » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 8:35 PM UTC

philsnow wrote: post #563

horsawlarway wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason they can't put a reasonable support ticket price in place. Hell - MS has been doing it for ages. Make the support request cost $250-$500. Guarantee a human on the other end. That drops spam/scam attempts down to basically nothing. It also helps cover the cost of providing real review. Plus, $500 is a very reasonable expense for most companies (basically negligible for all but the smallest), and it's…

That's pretty much an impossible (or at the very least, asymmetric) amount of money in much of the world. So charge them less? Now the scammers will call from those places. How does msft handle support contracts from customers in the developing world?

> How does msft handle support contracts from customers in the developing world?

As far as I know it's priced the same. In the context of this discussion - A business to business relationship - $500 is pretty reasonable at a global level.

For an individual consumer - I think $500 is a fairly steep price even in the US (and other 1st world countries) and that's by design.

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

#992

Post by spondyl » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 1:12 AM UTC

nvarsj wrote: 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…

> I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem.

I can recommend reading In The Plex. Quite literally the founders wanted to invert the usual model and put engineers first. There were some anecdotes from those in roles like marketing and so on that they felt like second class citizens.

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

#993

Post by airpoint » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 1:15 AM UTC

rabboRubble wrote: post #754

Perfect time to advertise Google's Takeout Services: https://takeout.google.com/ This service permits the export of (nearly?) all Google services data on both a scheduled and unscheduled on-demand basis. I have my Google account configure to automatically export all service data every 2 months and upload ZIP files to MS OneDrive. This process completely bypasses me and my local computer. I just have to remember to ch…

I just learned about Takeout today. The question I still have though is, how do you import those exports back into some usable state/service?

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

#994

Post by bloomark » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 4:49 AM UTC

justinclift wrote: post #968

ldiracdelta wrote: post #941

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 af…

Have you ever tried escalating? You can do that at Amazon, but not with Google.

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

#995

Post by yyyk » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 12:16 PM UTC

ehvatum wrote: post #985

yyyk wrote: post #961

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ident…

>The Google Play store offers countless examples where graph algorithms and ML could identify the worst behavior for human review.

The last sentence is key: 'for human review'. Google feels humans are damage to be routed around. If there was a way to everything in ML they'd go for it, but if your solution requires human review it's a no-go.

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

#996

Post by glenneroo » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 6:20 PM UTC

bogdan314 wrote: post #981

nerfhammer wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

I can't speak about Nvidia, but we just hosted a ~25 person LAN party at work and decided to go with Stadia... never again. Some people couldn't even make an account because they didn't have a credit card (even though we planned to mostly play free titles). Literally every game needed 20-40 minutes before we finally got everyone in - we never pinpointed the root cause, but a combination of restarting Chrome (emptying cache), relogging into Stadia, rebooting PCs and re-hosting a match, we managed to play a few titles. In a couple cases, we just gave up trying to get more than a handful of people in the game. Some people couldn't ever get their keyboard or mouse working in some titles (myself included, one game in particular was fine for awhile, then suddenly my mouse stopped registering in-game - rebooting and having the host restart the server didn't help - googling my issue says I'm not alone).

Some of these titles I've played multiplayer via Steam without any of the related issues, granted Steam/Stadia is an apples/oranges comparison.

At the end I suggested we try Armagetron. 2.7MB download and runs on Mac/Win/Linux/Potatoes. I started up a private server and we were running a 16-player game without any issues in literally 5 minutes.

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

#997

Post by rabboRubble » Fri, Feb 12, 2021, 10:06 PM UTC

airpoint wrote: post #993

rabboRubble wrote: post #754

Perfect time to advertise Google's Takeout Services: https://takeout.google.com/ This service permits the export of (nearly?) all Google services data on both a scheduled and unscheduled on-demand basis. I have my Google account configure to automatically export all service data every 2 months and upload ZIP files to MS OneDrive. This process completely bypasses me and my local computer. I just have to remember to ch…

I just learned about Takeout today. The question I still have though is, how do you import those exports back into some usable state/service?

good question, not exactly sure, need to download and look at contents... (queue Jeopardy thinking music) ...

Okay, so my account generates five 2GB zip files. I randomly picked file #4 and unzipped to inspect the contents. The structure of the zip file included the following:

* Google Photos

* Contacts

* Drive

* YouTube and YouTube Music

Interestingly, while the general structure looks okay, the content under the directories is incomplete. I'm not sure why this is. Like for example, "Contacts" has only one person's recently added Contact and only a JPG of an emoji face at that. That definitely isn't a complete data set, and makes me wonder if Takeout Services is not a cumulative back up, rather only a delta.

I downloaded a second file, to see how it was formatted. The second file also had Contacts data. It generally followed the contact groupings I have in place (ex. family, friends, medical, shopping, etc.). It had a smattering of .vcf files with profile pictures for some, but not all, people. YouTube directory had what looked to be a complete download of all videos I've ever uploaded, plus various other historical record of my YouTube activity.

Basically, it looks like recovery of a single service is only possible with a full set of recovery files (in my case, all 5 files). The content of each recovered service depends in great part on the nature of the service. There is a lot of garbage in the back up files for the unused / lightly used services. What's happening with the Contacts is a bit concerning since the the data is split between (apparently) all 5 back up files. Same thing for Drive, and maybe Mail.

Recovery of the data and service would be service by service, and dependent on the type of service, and the data provided in each service type.

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

#998

Post by steveBK123 » Sat, Feb 13, 2021, 8:01 PM UTC

galgalesh wrote: post #918

steveBK123 wrote: post #622

Unsurprising level of arrogance from Google. They are a monopoly. I am currently reading through Google’s SRE book and there’s a similar arrogance to it. It should be read as “here’s a bunch of practices that we can get away with because we are a monopoly & our end users are mostly non-paying/our real users are companies running ads”. So many practices in that book would get me and my entire team fired it’s hilarious…

> So many practices in that book would get me and my entire team fired it’s hilarious. Such as?

Induced outages when you are under your error budget because no one should build dependencies on your system assuming higher uptime than advertised.

Imagine..

Your home internet being cut for a day because it’s been up for 365 days and that’s better than the SLO.

Your iPhone sending 1 out of 1000 emails into the ether because you shouldn’t expect better than 99.9% service.

Bank losing some of your money because too many of their transfers went well this month.

Boeing crashing a plane because they didn’t do enough this year.

Very cool stuff.

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

#999

Post by thw0rted » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 8:55 AM UTC

nvahalik wrote: post #369

_qulr wrote: 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…

> 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…

The OP is about a personal Google account, with access to mail, etc. at stake, but it's also about a developer who was going to create content for their platform. Granted, Stadia is not exactly a make-or-break gatekeeper for publishing games, but that same dev account could well be used for Google Play Store, which controls about half of the mobile market. We've certainly seen plenty of those stories here -- app developer gets locked out, only recovers account / gets app un-banned by making enough noise to get attention.

IOW, it's "possible" for you or me to drop Google or Facebook, but for some lines of business, you're basically stuck working with them.

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

#1000

Post by molszanski » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 11:27 AM UTC

Strom wrote: post #682

benlivengood wrote: post #564

There are some pretty straightforward solutions for this; 1. Don't use personal gmail accounts for your business. 2. Don't mix different business units on the same account. (Your 5-year old adsense page you forgot about probably isn't compliant anymore). 3. If your personal account gets banned, hire someone whose job it is to manage your business google accounts and don't touch them.

> 1. Don't use personal gmail accounts for your business. A good practice but won't help with this issue. Google has a history of banning business (admin/paying) accounts when it thinks that some user (under that business domain) has an unrelated personal account that was banned. There have been stories here on HN describing how a small startup lost its Google Play account because one of their employees had their per…

They banned the whole 150+ organization google suite account.

Someone had a private, secondary email in the profile.

A private gmail account was suspended. They suspected that he has sent a "virus" in `*.apk` file as a gmail attachment.