> 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 happen.
Good example of standing up.
My impression from reports I've read about all the major App Stores is that they won't put much effort into processing violation notifications or takedown requests when the publisher or developer filing the complaint doesn't have an account of their own on the store - even less when they're banned (like how Terraria's devs were) - so it could be weeks or even months and the publisher of the knock-off or pirated copy gets to keep all the money they've made provided they've transferred it out of their payment account, I think?
But he won't pull Terraria from the Play Store I guess. Because he has no choice unless he wants to wreck his business.
Those would be easy to take down due to code/asset reuse and name reuse. You don't need to be an author on the platform to file DMCA reports. Otherwise, there are already lots of actual Terraria clones by different names.
They’ll have a ridiculously strong case.
Same reason why you don't see knock offs on Playstation - the approval process is complex, very long and pretty costly.
Also the revenue of the PC version should be roughly 4x all of the mobile versions combined (twice the amount of units sold, double the price).
Still there as of yet.
But maybe he means that he won’t be pushing any updates to Google Play?
Current Version 1.4.0.5.2.1
Updated December 8, 2020
Requires Android 4.4 and up
Time will tell I guess
If you sue a behemoth like Google or Amazon, they'll likely gladly make a settlement with you that's considerably greater than the actual damages because they value the NDAs and lack-of-PR damage from the inevitable Wall St. Journal headlines...
* Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.)
* Internal Politics (eg. one team has found this account DoSing their service, while the account is perfectly normal in all other ways, but due to Googles systems being so complex a single-service ban is very hard to implement)
* GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
* Stolen/shared accounts. All it takes is one evil browser extension to steal your user account cookie and go on a spamming spree. Figuring out how it happened is near impossible (user specific logs are anonymized). Usually just resetting the users logins doesn't solve it because the malware is still on the users computer/phone and will steal the cookie again.
* Falsely linked accounts. Some spammers create gmail addresses to send spam, but to disguise them they link lots of real peoples accounts for example via using someone elses recovery phone number, email address, contacts/friends, etc. In many cases they will compromise real accounts to create all these links, all so that as many real users as possible will be hurt if their spamming network is shutdown.
* Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn't even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn't be able to tell good from bad accounts.
* Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn't like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking "save to drive". The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.
Yes, it's solvable, and Google should put more effort into it, but it's hard to do.
Now that sounds like a technical problem that could be solved!
This is simply wrong since the account is always "banned" and not "deleted". So the data is still there, not providing it is going against GDPR. Evidence for this is all the accounts that were unbanned and still had their data. Make the account read-only for all I care but don't think for a second that this data has to be deleted immediately (It definitely does not, there are reasons and reasonable ways for data to be retained for some time)
> * Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn't even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn't be able to tell good from bad accounts.
But somehow accounts get unbanned if they get enough attention... so this does not seem to be a problem.
> * Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn't like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking "save to drive". The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.
So simultaneusly you can look at the image to ban the account but can't look at it to unban it? I get that the first one is done by algorithms and the second one presumably is not but calling this a privacy issue is laughable since you don't have to look at the content in the first place.
All of your points don't adress the issue of "The user does not even know why he was banned" at all. Luckily there are EU laws in the pipeline for that.
This is a solved problem - you just have to be willing to realise that magic AI sprinkles aren’t the answer.
As for cost - this continual stream of screwups is costing them a ridiculous amount of goodwill and future business. It’s probably the best ad for AWS there is.
* You can be banned from Google Pay and all payment based services, yet still have a Google account which works for free services. There are lots of gnarly corners and bugs for users in this category, since any call to a billing API will fail. Want to use google Meet for a video call? You can't because that calls Google Voice to check your balance for phone calls, and that fails... You can end up on this list if your bank tells Google that they have evidence of committing fraud for example.
* Adwords can be banned separately. Usually done for accounts who abuse the "$100 of promotional credit" things... Prevents use of paid chat in youtube as a side effect.
* Various Youtube features can be banned separately from the account. Used for copyright strikes etc. Causes side effects like for example Google photos can't sync videos as part of an android backup because it's the same backend and rules.
Google chooses this path, it’s not forced on them.
Having 10 highly paid long-tenured engineering employees who can look at small parts of a users account data is clearly better than having 10,000 call center workers be able to access user private data.
The end result is high profile incidents get handled in a way that it would be too risky to do for everyone.
Even with the small pool of engineers, there are incidents[1] where user data is used inappropriately. Would you make this pool larger?
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-stalked-teen...
I don't see why all the reasons above mean basic transparency can't happen.
That's absolutely not how GDPR works.
If any entity requires a huge amount of Twitter followers to get support, count me out.
Of course, there's some stuff you can disable that completely breaks how you'd expect e.g. Android integration to work with that account.
Humans have been using social pressure to right wrongs.... for millenia.
Twitter is nothing more than a common social square.
Only seems to be an issue for companies like Google who ideologically don't provide any way to talk to a human and escalate. Amazon manages to have some of the best customer service in the world while operating on similar scales with far more things that can go wrong.
There is no excuse.
That's my personal take on the current situation: despite owning one of the largest digital store, Google sucks at being a publisher. The actual automated ban is mostly inconsequential. Every large publishers have technical issue from time to time. What's unique to Google is that you can't effectively contact anyone to have them sorted out.
If you are an indie dev with a track record and works with Steam, XBLA, Epic or Nintendo, you will be in touch with a company representative.
If you had experience with this, you would know that you just described the polar opposite of how that process works in the United States. Federal law requires human verification as part of the mandatory NCMEC reporting process. If you’re employed by Google and have that impression of how it works it means the green badges doing the work aren’t known to you, which isn’t a huge shock since TVCs are barely one step above disposable barcode at Google.
Source: I’ve forensically verified enough child exploitation in the course of tech employment to make me thoroughly and irredeemably despise humanity as a species. (Fighting insurance to pay for therapy I now need, against their will, was fun too.)
Another way to look at this: Valve's treatment of developers (not nearly as bad as Google, to be clear) is mostly tolerated because of Steam's inertia and market share. Google is acting like Stadia has inertia and market share when it has neither.
Child porn detection and enforcement literally does not work that way. I'm not sure how you even think that would work. How do you think the algorithm gets trained? Humans feed data into it. All the major social media companies (Facebook, etc) have paid human moderators that have to screen flagged content in many cases to determine whether it is illegal and then escalate to the relevant staff or authorities, and in some cases this is a legal requirement.
The GDPR one is especially ridiculous. Why would you be required to delete a user's data the moment you suspend their account? That's utterly absurd, it completely eliminates the user's recourse in the event of an error. No reasonable human being would interpret the laws that way and the relevant regulators (yes, GDPR is enforced by humans) would never require you to do that.
Google already has measures to deal with malware on machines, typically temporary or permanent bans of the hardware and/or IP address. They don't have to permanently delete your gmail account to lock out Chrome on a single malwared PC. If you've ever done any automation or browsed on a shared network you've probably seen Google Search throw up the 'automated traffic' warning and block you for a bit.
Being able to review conduct of an account (i.e. browse logs) is not "blanket access to your account" and neither is being able to examine the details on why the account was banned and reverse them. The account owner could also authorize the employee to access their data - any time you talk to a Customer Service representative for a company, you're doing this.
the amount of people using Stadia that don't have access to a device that could play terraria is likely very small.
1. Ignore the downvotes. The reality (poor customer service perception) is what it is. Objectively looking at the problem and what can be done about it, without cynically assuming it's impossible, is the most practical focus going forward. Thanks very much for this insight, it was really interesting to read.
2. I've noticed various glitches and bugs over the years with various services - two I can remember right now are a) misspelling a search then clicking "did you mean" won't update the titlebar (been watching this one since ~2012), and b) accidentally sending an in-progress draft from one device will cause followup edits made on another device to sent to /dev/null. Well... I look at the kind of time-wasting junk input that makes it into Issue Tracker, I look at random app feedback, etc, and I know my feedback is never going to be seen. I can understand why things need to impact 10K people to be noticed. I thought I'd ask you: what's a good recommendation here?
3. Extremely specific question that I happen to be worrying about at the moment :) - I wasn't sure which Google account I wanted to use to play with GCP some months ago so I ended up enabling billing on more than one account using the same card. I have an idea I'd like to play which would call for a new account (since it would be tied to a YouTube channel) and would require me to use the same card yet again. All of this would be staying within the free tier, but I still wonder if I shouldn't run data takeouts first...? (I can't deny that the current state of Google services feels a bit like Russian roulette with extra servings of superstition - what doesn't kill your account, makes it stronger, or something??)
Do you mean with technology or something like "technically it could have worked in the market"? Because if its the latter then I disagree. Its a service on which my entire library can disappear, I have to pay full price + subscription price and maybe buy new hardware (to play on TVs). I have no idea who this is for.
Now, unless you are high follower count, they will reply asking you to DM and give you a hold.
I do not think GDPR works like that. You can absolutely store information pertaining to "why" questions because that is still a service they will be providing. Also, whenever they restore some's service they give data back. So they have obviously not deleted the data.
Emphasis mine.
But isn't Terraria "complete" in the sense that maybe besides some bug fix there won't really be any updates anymore? (But potential successors to Terraria??)
Also given that it's about "moving forward" I highly doubt they will revert any existing support.
But their next game(s) might very likely not ship on Google Play (but potential alternative App stores).
In the end I guess their main marked is anyway Steam followed by the consoles (Switch, Playstation, XBox).
I just wonder if they sell more on GooglePlay or on the Apple App Store?
The games are published by an indie game studio.
Normally this is done over an separate, non personal, account. Sometimes even multiple non personal accounts for multiple products.
So RE-LOGIC's Google account should not have been affected.
I agree with you. It certainly will be interesting to see how this works out...
Yep. I worked for a small video game publisher with only four people in the entire company and we had a designated account representative at Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft we could (and did) contact when we had issues.
Might be harder as an indie dev, but if you have any track record, like you said, I'm sure they know someone they can contact.
It's likely that the primary devs have little to no control of that port, including the ability (and possibly ip rights) to take it down.
I believe you were going for hyperbole, but it reads more like misinformation instead. Please reconsider saying misleading shit like this, especially on HN.
Yes, I mean the technology. I played cyberpunk on it. It worked really well (better than I expected a streaming service to work).
> I have to pay full price + subscription price and maybe buy new hardware (to play on TVs).
You just need to pay the game to play in 1080p. The pro tier is if you want 4k and comes with free games. You can actually play free to play games like Destiny 2 for free on Stadia.
I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't know however. Google marketing was terrible.
This has to be the most bizarrely conceived product strategy ever. I know I am not a gamer, but... who is this targeting?
I played through Superhot and the best I can say is latency is impressive given it's beaming my inputs to a server, rendering, and beaming the frames back to me (though still not as good as just playing locally). But I had some horrible issues. Several play sessions had to end because my internet was being unreliable, as home internet tends to do. Not sure if someone started streaming Netflix or what, but that's kind of the issue -- I don't want someone else doing something on my network to be able to affect my gameplay session. Or if my ISP is just experiencing high traffic, or if the internet in my neighbourhood goes out, etc. There's so much that can and does go wrong, even if it's 99.9% reliable, that's not near enough for a video game.
Thankfully the game I was playing wasn't particularly time-sensitive, if it started lagging I could stop for a second and the game doesn't move forward (that's just how Superhot works, for anyone who isn't familiar). But I was seeing on the front page of the store you can buy Celeste and I just could not imagine playing a precision platformer like that with the bit of latency that exists, plus the possibility I get a lag spike and by the time it catches up I'm already dead and restarting the segment.
> Sadly this would make the system utterly trivial to gamify
There is a reasonable middle ground that would make gamification harder and at the same time satisfy less abusive users. You can disclose the sanction immediately, would need to add a short but variable delay before disclosing the underlying reason, to prevent abusing from abusing the system repeatedly.
and
> "Google has already decided to cancel Stadia"
mean entirely different things. Of course people expect Stadia to get cancelled, but to claim they've already decided to cancel it is disinformation. It's a blatant lie. Don't spread fake news.
It's for Google, trying out rent-seeking in a consumer channel with high fixed costs
Actual foreign developers who don’t speak English don’t have as much luck explaining themselves as indie irony-VN devs and can’t fix problems if Valve sees a picture of an anime and decides it was questionable sexual content when it wasn’t.
(Often it does still work out, some of the VNs had some really out there actual sexual content because they’re weirdos and the work was improved by removing it for Steam/Nintendo platform so
The difference is that now when they moderate, they call it something other than moderation and instantly permaban you and refuse to discuss it.
Normally that happens to me when I start to adjust my query to get Google to do what it used to do.
Valve definitely doesn't treat developers poorly (well their commission is too big but they are quite reasonable in how they interact with developers).
> They’re bad at dealing with Japanese content, if you get a reviewer who decides it’s “more gross anime shit” (as millenials like to do) they ban your game sight unseen with no appeal.
No, they don't do that. They ban games involving sexualisation of minors (e.g. your Twitter links below). Also I don't think there is a millennial conspiracy regarding Japanese content. I'm French I have literally been raised on Japanese import and the content you are linking seriously creeps me out.
People playing tekken don't even like it when one of the players is on wifi, because the difference in response time changes the game. On Stadia its a non starter.
I'm including their own employees under game developers. There's various stories about people having to leave after trying and failing to get the company to actually make a game or ship any products lately.
> They ban games involving sexualisation of minors (e.g. your Twitter links below).
Dunno if the games contain that or not, all I can tell you is they don't have illegal content in the US. They certainly can ban whatever they want. The problem is they say they don't moderate the store, and they don't negotiate the not-moderation, so now you can't find out how to avoid it.
The developers are not criminals or trying to gross you out, but they do have weird fetishes and I think might be physically incapable of making something Westerners would be fine with without a lot of handholding. I mean, Jun Maeda seems to think he's doing a good job at writing women, but they all come out acting like they have an IQ of 10.