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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

#621

Post by indigochill »

This incident seems pretty damning of Stadia in particular. What partner in their right mind would work with Stadia when that work can be arbitrarily canned for no reason and with no reasonable recourse (of course, I feel similarly about western game developers publishing in China given their review board and capricious past actions like banning Animal Crossing there because of players voicing support for Hong Kong in-game, yet major western developers continue to court China, so what do I know)?

There also seems to be some interesting correlation of megacorps being terrible at games, between Google doing their utmost to shoot Stadia in every foot it has, and Amazon execs having no idea how to produce games people actually want to play.

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

#622

Post by steveBK123 »

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.

There US government has changed our treatment of monopolies over the last 60 years such that we allow those that lower costs, so most of our current tech behemoths are able to continue... they are “free”.

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

#623

Post by grumple »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #240
mschuster91 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a human agent? File for a C&D and then, if that does not help, a court-issued injunction order ("Abmahnung" followed by "Antrag auf Erlass einer einstweiligen Verfügung"), if you're German. This works somewhat reasonable for Twitter, Facebook and Google.

You would need legal standing. A free account isn't your property.

Property might be the wrong word here. I suspect that you do have a contract of sorts with any company with whom you have a free account. The consideration is sharing your data in exchange for the account.

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

#624

Post by MockObject »

cactus2093 wrote: post #592
blunte wrote: post #477

Google uses non-human automation to make some decisions, including banning accounts. As others have mentioned, this is not unreasonable as long as there is a reasonable (in terms of time and effort) path to disputing a ban - i.e., speaking to a human about the issue. But Google (and Facebook, and probably some other companies) don't have reasonable processes for disputing or resolving these situations. Some have said…

I mostly agree with you, but I think you might be overestimating the benefit of simply having humans on the other end. There is a lot more to building "reasonable" processes than just adding humans to the mix, those people have to be given some power to make exceptions but not too much or it defeats the point of the original rules, and you will still have honest mistakes and a few bad actors on the dispute resolution…

It's hard for some people but, isn't this a field of expertise with decades of development? Aren't there thousands of people who have years of experience managing exactly such a process?

The problem isn't that it's hard, but that it's a cost center instead of a profit center.

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

#626

Post by MockObject »

aspaceman wrote: post #533
gowld wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been what 10 years of this, already? Even with Facebook gobbling up ad space and Apple gobbling up mobile? How long can a coaster coast?

It’s honestly really sad / pathetic. Big ass tech company been around for ages saying it’s gonna change the world. All you do is coast. Like what. Could you imagine going back in time and saying that to folks? That their whole “I’m gonna change the world” routine is going to be given up on?

They already did change the world, and they gave us a new household verb, placing them in maybe the top 10 most successful businesses of the last 100 years?

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

#627

Post by ashtonkem »

retSava wrote: post #299
ashtonkem wrote: post #160

You’d think that there’d be a “this person is high profile and any automated bans will cause a stink” flag on accounts to require human review on such decisions, but apparently one of the richer companies in the world just can’t be bothered to hire a few extra people to avoid a PR problem. That or they’re convinced that they’re this close to fixing the automated system, which they obviously are not.

On the other hand, I'd prefer they fix this process for everyone and not just those with X twitter followers. I'm completely uninterested in making waves on social media, but I still expect services (whether paid or free) to work as advertised considering I'm not misbehaving. If they don't want me as customer/user, then say so and I'll find another provider.

As an end user, I agree. But Google clearly doesn’t care in the slightest about the end user; if they did we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’m thinking about this from Google’s own self interest only.

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

#628

Post by MockObject »

prepend wrote: post #615
Spooky23 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this sort of thing is that because it's interstate commerce, states usually do not have standing to regulate effectively. The Federal government struggles to implement new regulatory authority because of political challenges. Various groups of stakeholders will declare any such regulation an infringement on free speech (ie. "The constitution gives me the right to sell fake penis pills to fund my radi…

This was addressed in the UCC and is pretty simple actually as each state implements laws to saw who has jurisdiction and how to handle. It also bypasses the federal government in that the code is established by some big council and implemented in (most) states. That’s why when I live in Missouri and buy something from a vendor in New York, they still have to accept returns, issue refunds, provide for basic warrantie…

> Because of UCC, if I give away a product for free, I have to support it through its commercial life. So if I hand out knives, for free, and they explode after 20 years, I must still support it. Even if they come with a form that users have to click that says “I will not sue PrependCo if these free knives explode.”

Why does the UCC covers free knives, but not paid Google services?

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

#629

Post by brundolf »

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…

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 we could!"

That part is true! But then:

"Productization? Pricing? Market-fit? Customer service and messaging? Whatever, we've got good tech, it'll sell itself. We can figure all that other stuff out later, that's the easy part."

...cue the flop. It was always going to be this way.

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

#630

Post by ativzzz »

Justsignedup wrote: post #619
blunte wrote: post #477

Google uses non-human automation to make some decisions, including banning accounts. As others have mentioned, this is not unreasonable as long as there is a reasonable (in terms of time and effort) path to disputing a ban - i.e., speaking to a human about the issue. But Google (and Facebook, and probably some other companies) don't have reasonable processes for disputing or resolving these situations. Some have said…

I remember someone had a post here a couple years back: - They bought google wireless. - Their charge was declined, whatever the reason, they wanted to correct that. Or possibly an accidental dispute. - Google disabled their account because of non-payment - Google's customer support couldn't help because they weren't a paying customer. - They literally couldn't do ANYTHING because google was ignoring every step of th…

Do you mean google fiber? I've called fiber before I had an account there to ask some questions and I had 0 problems talking to a human immediately and they answered all my questions.
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