11 ms·

As usual, some Googler browsing HN will reactivate his account, everyone will forget and Google won't change a thing to his unbanning process.

Svip 6y ago
Makes you wonder whether that is their unbanning process.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
pedrogpimenta 6y ago
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 happen.
- 3327 6y ago
  Good on him. Takes courage and an established product to do this. Good example of standing up.
  - WA 6y ago
    > Good example of standing up. But he won't pull Terraria from the Play Store I guess. Because he has no choice unless he wants to wreck his business.
    - TonyTrapp 6y ago
      That's actually an interesting point. If it is tied to the same Google account, will he still get money from apps sold through the play store? Can he pull an app from the play store if he cannot even log in?
      - dathinab 6y ago
        He is a private person. 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.
    - chmod775 6y ago
      The Play Store Terraria is a different publisher. It's likely not his decision to make - and he shouldn't care considering that makes dealing with Google on that front is not his problem. 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).
    - codetrotter 6y ago
      https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.and.games505.TerrariaPaid&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.and.games5... 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
      - exikyut 6y ago
        Google Play / Android != Stadia
        dathinab 6y ago
        > Consider it burned. #Terraria for @GoogleStadia is canceled. My company will no longer support *any of your platforms* moving forward. 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?
        exikyut 6y ago
        Oh, right. Completely overlooked that bit. I agree with you. It certainly will be interesting to see how this works out...
        ajford 6y ago
        The Android port appears to be published by 505 Games and Codeglue, and more recently Pipeworks, according to Wikipedia. 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.
    - gambiting 6y ago
      Play Store isn't struggling for content. Removing terraria from it has zero impact on Google's bottom line. Stadia on the other hand very much is - removal(or cancellation) of an extremely popular indie game from the platform just accelerates its inevitable demise, something that will very much hit google's bottom line.
      - moron4hire 6y ago
        Even if they haven't said it out loud, Google has already decided to cancel Stadia, so unfortunately cancelling a game for it will have zero impact on Google.
        delecti 6y ago
        Google closed one of their first party Stadia game development studios. They haven't decided to cancel Stadia as a whole yet, at least not publicly.
        moron4hire 6y ago
        We've seen the playbook often enough. If you think they aren't going to close it down in 3 years, you're wasting money.
        delecti 6y ago
        Stadia hasn't gotten a dollar from me, and won't. I absolutely think it'll be gone by then, but that's not the same thing as "has already decided to cancel".
        Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
        > "If you think they aren't going to close it down in 3 years, you're wasting money." 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.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    Unfortunately this opens the door to unscrupulous devs publishing their own knock-off versions - or even repackaging the official Terraria Windows game and passing it off as their own work (resource/asset swaps, etc). 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?
    - viraptor 6y ago
      > repackaging the official Terraria Windows game and passing it off as their own work 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.
    - hedora 6y ago
      If that happens, they should sue Google for dealing in counterfeit goods. They’ll have a ridiculously strong case.
      - robin_reala 6y ago
        Another way of putting it: if a 3rd party published a Mario game on Playstation, do you think Nintendo would hold back just because they are not also there?
      - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
        Amazon deals in counterfeit goods all the time and there's still been no substantial changes to how they deal with it either. 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...
  - BunsanSpace 6y ago
    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.
- thetanil 6y ago
  I think it's also probably easy to do this with stadia since it's effectively 0 users. What would he say if steam treated devs like google does?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - brmgb 6y ago
    If Valve treated game developers like Google does, Steam would have followed the path of Stadia which is failing despite being technically a good product. 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.
    - newswasboring 6y ago
      > technically a good product. 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.
      - brmgb 6y ago
        > Do you mean with technology or something like "technically it could have worked in the market"? 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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sf_rob 6y ago
  Agreed about small devs, but other small devs also have to make countless decisions about which platforms/products to use for their app/platform/website. At the very least, Google should be worried that a good tie-breaker is "Is it a Google platform?".
Hamuko 6y ago
Or the @GoogleStadia Twitter account will forward this to someone who knows about it. The Stadia Twitter account is uncharacteristically active on customer support for a Google product.
- Shorel 6y ago
  Twitter seems to be the worst platform ever created to get customer support. If any entity requires a huge amount of Twitter followers to get support, count me out.
  - jan_Inkepa 6y ago
    I think twitter is last time I checked (looking at guidelines maybe 3/4 years ago) pretty amazing for customer support, even if you drop the fact that well-followed people might get better support. The expected reply time for twitter support queries is on the order of minutes. Compare that to phone or email customer support on many platforms.
    - bencollier49 6y ago
      That's no longer the case. In my experience, most companies have stopped responding to complaints on Twitter. They have a set playbook now which asks you to DM them and then sends you a holding message.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      This was for a short period a two or three years ago, no longer. Now, unless you are high follower count, they will reply asking you to DM and give you a hold.
  - criley2 6y ago
    It's no different than pre-internet. Complaining publically has been around since TV, it's a staple of local news to have "exposes" on bad local businesses to shame them when they won't do right privately. Before that it was radio. Before that it was newspaper. Before that, it was just gossip. Humans have been using social pressure to right wrongs.... for millenia. Twitter is nothing more than a common social square.
londons_explore 6y ago
People at Google really do want to fix this... But it's a minefield of: * 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.
- andruby 6y ago
  > due to Googles systems being so complex a single-service ban is very hard to implement Now that sounds like a technical problem that could be solved!
  - 6y ago

Svip 6y ago

Makes you wonder whether that is their unbanning process.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

pedrogpimenta 6y ago

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 happen.

3327 6y ago
Good on him. Takes courage and an established product to do this. Good example of standing up.
- WA 6y ago
  > Good example of standing up. But he won't pull Terraria from the Play Store I guess. Because he has no choice unless he wants to wreck his business.
  - TonyTrapp 6y ago
    That's actually an interesting point. If it is tied to the same Google account, will he still get money from apps sold through the play store? Can he pull an app from the play store if he cannot even log in?
    - dathinab 6y ago
      He is a private person. 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.
  - chmod775 6y ago
    The Play Store Terraria is a different publisher. It's likely not his decision to make - and he shouldn't care considering that makes dealing with Google on that front is not his problem. 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).
  - codetrotter 6y ago
    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.and.games505.TerrariaPaid&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.and.games5... 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
    - exikyut 6y ago
      Google Play / Android != Stadia
      - dathinab 6y ago
        > Consider it burned. #Terraria for @GoogleStadia is canceled. My company will no longer support *any of your platforms* moving forward. 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?
        exikyut 6y ago
        Oh, right. Completely overlooked that bit. I agree with you. It certainly will be interesting to see how this works out...
        ajford 6y ago
        The Android port appears to be published by 505 Games and Codeglue, and more recently Pipeworks, according to Wikipedia. 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.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    Play Store isn't struggling for content. Removing terraria from it has zero impact on Google's bottom line. Stadia on the other hand very much is - removal(or cancellation) of an extremely popular indie game from the platform just accelerates its inevitable demise, something that will very much hit google's bottom line.
    - moron4hire 6y ago
      Even if they haven't said it out loud, Google has already decided to cancel Stadia, so unfortunately cancelling a game for it will have zero impact on Google.
      - delecti 6y ago
        Google closed one of their first party Stadia game development studios. They haven't decided to cancel Stadia as a whole yet, at least not publicly.
        moron4hire 6y ago
        We've seen the playbook often enough. If you think they aren't going to close it down in 3 years, you're wasting money.
        delecti 6y ago
        Stadia hasn't gotten a dollar from me, and won't. I absolutely think it'll be gone by then, but that's not the same thing as "has already decided to cancel".
        Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
        > "If you think they aren't going to close it down in 3 years, you're wasting money." 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.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  Unfortunately this opens the door to unscrupulous devs publishing their own knock-off versions - or even repackaging the official Terraria Windows game and passing it off as their own work (resource/asset swaps, etc). 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?
  - viraptor 6y ago
    > repackaging the official Terraria Windows game and passing it off as their own work 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.
  - hedora 6y ago
    If that happens, they should sue Google for dealing in counterfeit goods. They’ll have a ridiculously strong case.
    - robin_reala 6y ago
      Another way of putting it: if a 3rd party published a Mario game on Playstation, do you think Nintendo would hold back just because they are not also there?
    - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      Amazon deals in counterfeit goods all the time and there's still been no substantial changes to how they deal with it either. 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...
- BunsanSpace 6y ago
  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.
thetanil 6y ago
I think it's also probably easy to do this with stadia since it's effectively 0 users. What would he say if steam treated devs like google does?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- brmgb 6y ago
  If Valve treated game developers like Google does, Steam would have followed the path of Stadia which is failing despite being technically a good product. 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.
  - newswasboring 6y ago
    > technically a good product. 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.
    - brmgb 6y ago
      > Do you mean with technology or something like "technically it could have worked in the market"? 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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sf_rob 6y ago
Agreed about small devs, but other small devs also have to make countless decisions about which platforms/products to use for their app/platform/website. At the very least, Google should be worried that a good tie-breaker is "Is it a Google platform?".

Hamuko 6y ago

Or the @GoogleStadia Twitter account will forward this to someone who knows about it. The Stadia Twitter account is uncharacteristically active on customer support for a Google product.

Shorel 6y ago
Twitter seems to be the worst platform ever created to get customer support. If any entity requires a huge amount of Twitter followers to get support, count me out.
- jan_Inkepa 6y ago
  I think twitter is last time I checked (looking at guidelines maybe 3/4 years ago) pretty amazing for customer support, even if you drop the fact that well-followed people might get better support. The expected reply time for twitter support queries is on the order of minutes. Compare that to phone or email customer support on many platforms.
  - bencollier49 6y ago
    That's no longer the case. In my experience, most companies have stopped responding to complaints on Twitter. They have a set playbook now which asks you to DM them and then sends you a holding message.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    This was for a short period a two or three years ago, no longer. Now, unless you are high follower count, they will reply asking you to DM and give you a hold.
- criley2 6y ago
  It's no different than pre-internet. Complaining publically has been around since TV, it's a staple of local news to have "exposes" on bad local businesses to shame them when they won't do right privately. Before that it was radio. Before that it was newspaper. Before that, it was just gossip. Humans have been using social pressure to right wrongs.... for millenia. Twitter is nothing more than a common social square.

londons_explore 6y ago

People at Google really do want to fix this... But it's a minefield of: * 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.

andruby 6y ago
> due to Googles systems being so complex a single-service ban is very hard to implement Now that sounds like a technical problem that could be solved!
- 6y ago