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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

#431

Post by BunsanSpace »

3327 wrote: post #20
pedrogpimenta wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully, more devs will do what this dev is (said to be) doing. > Consider it burned. #Terraria for @GoogleStadia is canceled. My company will no longer support any of your platforms moving forward. Of course, it's very difficult for small devs to do this. It takes an already solid business to be able to stand up like this. As always, I think this is the only way for Google to change, but I don't think it can happe…

Good on him. Takes courage and an established product to do this. Good example of standing up.

Not really, Terraria has already been ported to all systems, including Android.

the amount of people using Stadia that don't have access to a device that could play terraria is likely very small.

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

#432

Post by bogwog »

josephg wrote: post #33
nobodyshere wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd easily pay for a personal gmail account which has all the privacy protections on and also 24/7 access to customer support via chat and phone. Sadly most of that is only provided for business accounts.

Is there a good reason to keep using gmail? I've only got good things to say about Fastmail - which is paid, reliable, faster than gmail and private. And they're reinvesting some of their revenue into making better standards for email. I haven't needed to contact support, but I think they have a manned tech support email address too.

If you're going to switch email providers to something like Fastmail, be smart about it and register a custom domain, and pay a little extra to hook it up to your new account (unless Fastmail lets you do it for free).

Just get a domain like `Smith.com` and then use the email `John@Smith.com`. Then it doesn't matter if you're using Gmail, Fastmail, Protonmail, etc. You can switch to a different company whenever you want (to get the best rate, avoid abusive terms, bad service, etc) without having to update your business cards, websites, online accounts, etc.

You'll still need to have a way to back up your old messages though.

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

#433

Post by kg »

vidarh wrote: post #388
izacus wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few months ago I've seen a Googler pissed on Twitter about how their spouses GMail account got suspended and he got completely stonewalled internally as well. It seems that even Googlers themselves cannot get any human contact for account support. (Sadly I can't find that Twitter thread anymore.) EDIT: Found it - https://twitter.com/miguelytob/status/1315749803041619981

> EDIT: Found it - https://twitter.com/miguelytob/status/1315749803041619981 From recent tweets, it seems he's now leaving Google, and is busy retweeting stuff about people who have been fired and/or are suing Google. Wonder if him leaving has anything to do with that incident and whether it was ever resolved.

Many high-profile departures from Google seem to involve an incident like this, in my experience. When I was there most of the high-profile departures I saw were related to internal strife (in some cases with widely shared complaint posts on internal G+ or internal gdocs), management misconduct, or things like the company's health insurer refusing to cover surgeries. Then occasionally you have the departures where notorious abusers or sex pests are sent off with a severance package, like ("allegedly") Andy Rubin's $90m farewell gift.

In my direct personal experience, I went on medical leave near the end of my stay there and when I came back over half of my team had quit and bailed for other companies or other orgs (largely over complaints with management).

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

#434

Post by pnt12 »

turbinerneiter wrote: post #82

As long as the cost of false-positives is lower than the cost of human support staff, they will keep doing this stuff. Millions of pages of EULA, but not a single line in there to protect the user? No right to get your data once banned? No right to appeal or even be informed about the reasons? Just imagine if Google ran the Justice system! They would suspend peoples drivers licenses without their knowledge and then t…

The cost/loss idea is bad enough, but that person is a business partner and this situation might be the final nail on stadia's coffin.

Would be interesting if this stadia fiasco would lead to Google rethinking their customer support (ie actually start treating their users as customers).

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

#435

Post by delecti »

kg wrote: post #430
delecti wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He mentions having purchased thousands of dollars of apps on the play store. You're not wrong about nonpaying customers being the product, it's just not relevant to this story.

The catch is that having a Google Account is free. Whether or not you made Play Store purchases isn't relevant to the people who handle accounts or (for example) automated gmail bans. And as it happens, if the gmail team decides to ban you, it cascades to the services where you spent money.

That's conjecture though. You don't know which team decided to ban him. You don't know whether he pays for a G Suites, or expanded Drive storage.

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

#436

Post by kevingadd »

detritus wrote: post #344

As an aside - what benefit is there to having a game such as Terraria on Stadia in the first place? It has fairly low system requirements, and given how much energy is eaten up by server-side rendering and streaming, it seems wasteful in this context.

Typically deals like this are about a mixture of cash and access. The platform holder will often partially or fully fund development, sometimes they pay an advance on sales up-front. For one project I worked on Sony provided an up-front advance that fully covered the port in addition to some sales (and it took a while to recoup for reasons mostly under their control.)

My guess for this is that given Terraria's large fanbase and high profile, Google probably handed them an advance for this and promised some promotion once the title launched on Stadia. Stadia also potentially provides access to users who can't play it on PC (it has a client for phones and some TVs, etc)

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

#437

Post by kevingadd »

suction wrote: post #371
detritus wrote: post #344

As an aside - what benefit is there to having a game such as Terraria on Stadia in the first place? It has fairly low system requirements, and given how much energy is eaten up by server-side rendering and streaming, it seems wasteful in this context.

I agree. Also, I don't want Stadia to become flooded with cheap indie games, at least not for now. Because the storefront is so bad (no search), it would make it very hard to find the things you want. Google should concentrate Stadia's efforts to make AAA-games available to people who don't want a console or gaming PC, because that's a real niche. I personally know 5 people who would never buy dedicated gaming hardwa…

Not sure how "cheap indie games" comes into the picture here, Terraria is a wildly successful and sophisticated game that's sold over 30m copies lifetime and is available on a bunch of platforms. We're not talking about a Flappy Bird clone.

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

#438

Post by prepend »

_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…

You know it’s funny that lots of the basic functions of business with consumers (eg, ability to return items) were set and codified in the US as the Uniform Commercial Code [0] that was established in 1952. Before then it was wild and variable.

What’s really interesting is that it seems like of hacker-like in how it was implemented. It was published as a guide and then states passed laws to implement.

Reminds me of a de facto standard that is then implemented by vendors.

I suppose we could start up some form of Uniform Consumer Commercial Code (UC3) that set up practices that are good that could then be passed by states.

I shudder to think through all the arguments about how it would specify some “don’t be evil on social cause X” that it almost smarts my conspiracy brain that the “corporations” started this trend to bikeshed/scissor statement society so they can’t make meaningful economic and commercial policy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code

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

#439

Post by kevingadd »

villgax wrote: post #163

Gives me a chuckle for every high profile case such as this. Just get a domain & link it with a Zoho Mail account or any other paid one, for everything else use self-hosted storage

Does Zoho Mail offer Youtube accounts now? Any serious game ends up needing promotion on YT.

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

#440

Post by bogwog »

toyg wrote: post #408
Mizza wrote: post #143

Man, some of those replies on Twitter are unreasonably harsh to this guy. Being a game developer seems like a really thankless task. Why are so many game players so entitled and unfriendly?

> Why are so many game players so entitled and unfriendly? Probably because they are the biggest group out there. Games are now bigger than movies, after all. The bigger the group, the more likely it is to contain a well-populated minority of viciously hateful people, a bit like "the bigger the country, the more likely it is that it will contain a sizeable group of hardcore nazis".

There's that, but also the fact that to these people games are "just games". Maybe the HN crowd is accustomed to dealing with professionals and business clients that use their software, so it looks jarring to see responses like in that Twitter thread.

As a developer providing professional software, you're reasonably entitled to some respect from your customers, since your relationship is likely work related. But if you're making games, your product is eating up peoples' very valuable free time. If you mess that up for them, then you shouldn't be surprised to get a torrent of hate mail.

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