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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

#721

I just want to know why is no one willing to hold Google and Apple accountable? Why don't journalists from e.g TechCrunch or the Verge confront Sundar point blank and ask him how can stuff like this happen and why is the only solution to blow up on social media?

I’ve never been unable to chat with an Apple rep. Have had no problems reaching people about dev accounts, but also no problem even about consumer subscription services with unusual challenges, such as wanting to merge music or app libraries belonging to two different Apple IDs. (Can be done, an self-serve easy way and an Apple-performed hard way.) In earlier HN thread, someone said “Devs would be more than happy to…

apple support is shit, even if you can talk with an rep. their first level basically tries to stop you going down the levels, the second level basically just forwards you. most of the time it's not even the people, it's basically their stupid system where you have your dedicated rep, but the only way to contact him is by using a stupid form/voice which sometimes prints stupid error message and you have no idea if it gone trough. also if there is a mistake in the system and they have no clue about it you are lost or you need to pay tons of money.

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

#723
post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many alternatives to email -- Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Proton, iCloud, etc. How can you argue with a straight face that Google has a monopoly on email?

Clearly Email is not the point of discussion here, as no one is building a business around it. It's Android with its app ecosystem, stadia, YouTube etc. Do you not see any problem with having effectively no support for these services?

Why is Google forced to provide customer support* for something they provide for free?

* they do provide customer support, it could obviously be a lot better

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

#724

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…

The problem seems to be that spam (and fraud) are increasing, especially in the domain of identity.

Companies have been answering this growth with machine learning and that machine learning appears to scale poorly. Humans also scale pretty poorly. What would regulation look like?

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

#725

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…

I agree, we need better laws around customer service and data handling, absolutely. For (as far as I could ever tell) no reason, Facebook marked my account as a bot in roughly 2015 and refused to let me access any of my account data until I proof of identity. They wanted a picture of my driver's license and a picture of me to confirm. I never sent it in, instead emailing and asking if there was any other way to get v…

Why is it "intense verification?" What is a good alternative? I lost access to my blizzard account once and I had to send in my driver's license.

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

#726
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…

The narrow "want to play games on my mac" problem could be solved if game developers chose to build the game cross-platform from the start and release a mac build. Many games are already cross-platform, as they run on both Windows and consoles. The fact that so many game companies don't even bother with a mac build shows they don't want to solve this for whatever reason (probably mac just not profitable enough). If a…

Doing a Mac build from Unreal or Unity is generally easy (and most of the smaller games that use those engines do release Mac builds); doing a Mac build from an in-house engine may be a ton of work

But more importantly: Mac hardware usually isn't really equipped for high-end games. If you have a pro-tier machine you might do okay, but nobody buys Macs for gaming, at the very least. It's just too niche of a market to go through a lot of effort to support it

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

#727
I had an old blogger account with a domain registered through the blogger site.

It expired and I got repeated emails about signing into my G Suite account to address it. But I didn't register it and I don't have a G Suite account... and the only support is, step 1, sign into G Suite.

I finally tracked down the registrar they used and I contacted them directly and they helped me re-register the domain.

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

#728
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…

I agree with the principle, but in a world of finite resources you've got to pick your battles. The reality is that there is no system in existence that's gonna work perfectly for billions of users, more so when you've got malicious actors trying to abuse the system, so you need to quantify the scale of the problem and decide how much effort you put in to fixing it.

It is, unfortunately, the same in many aspects of life, including many criminal justice systems. For example, if you are wrongly convicted in the UK it is incredibly hard to get that conviction overturned. It's literally life destroying for the people affected (definitely a lot worse than losing access to your gmail account!) but apparently the majority of the public don't know or don't care enough to pressure politicians in to changing it.

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

#729
As with mobile phone companies, airlines, and ISPs you need to treat google as your enemy. All of the above consider you a necessary evil or risk. (Unlike airlines and telecommunications companies I don't believe google actively hates its users at all. It just sometimes behaves like those who do, due to the nature of things).

For Google, users are necessary as they are product to be sold. Next are various small customers (developers) as they help bring in more users, or user interactions to be monetized. Android, nest, even google cloud (lost $5B last year) are either ways to bring in more user interactions and/or ways to try to diversify the revenue stream slightly to try to convince Wall Street that they don't have all their eggs in one basket (which they do)

But there's a risk: every new user is a potential source of inappropriate content (basically: anything that might disturb the customers, who would complain about their ads being associated with something or other). Their volume is high (so there are lots of opportunities for bad actors) but also their volume is high (so false positives aren't a big deal). So it's natural to have an immune system that just boots out perceived risks and also natural not to do an expensive thing like trying to follow up and see if it was a mistake. There's no malice involved, any more than there is in a tiger that eats someone.

The only real defense for any individual or smaller organization is to reduce your risk envelope. 1: don't put all your eggs in a google basket, and 2: when you must use google, make separate, carefully unconnected accounts for each project.

This sounds like work, and it is, but you have to do your own backups, brush your teeth, and call your friends sometimes. That's life.

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

#730
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…

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…

One quick nitpick: The latency in streaming isn't as bad as you'd think

Most AAA games already have 200+ ms delays between pressing a button and anything happening on-screen. So there's plenty of room to redesign things to work around that latency in a lot of games

(This obviously doesn't apply to high-end play on twitch shooters or fighting games though, those are pretty much screwed when it comes to streaming)

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