Terraria dev cancels Stadia port after Google disabled his email account for three weeks
- Reference: 1612807329
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/02/08/terraria_developer_cancels_stadia_port/
- Source link:
Terraria , co-designed by Spinks, was first released for Windows in 2011 and has sold over 30 million copies across PC, consoles, and mobile devices, states a [1]post on the official forums last year.
[2]
The problems started, according to the official Twitter account, when Re-Logic Games [3]received an email concerning its YouTube channel "saying there was a TOS [Terms of Service] violation but that it was likely accidental and as such, the account would receive no strikes.
"Three days later, the entire Google account (YT, Gmail, all Google apps, even every purchase made over 15 years on Google Play Store) was disabled with no warning or recourse. This account links into many business functions and as such the impact to us is quite substantial," said Re-Logic.
[4]
The YouTube channel itself was not disabled, only the access to it.
The complaint was spotted on Twitter by YouTube support, which provided a link to the standard Google Account Recovery process. "We have attempted this process twice and received an automated response declining our request," said Re-Logic.
That was late last month. Now it seems the problem is still not fixed. "My account has now been disabled for over 3 weeks. I still have no idea why, and after using every resource I have to get this resolved you have done nothing but given me the runaround," [5]said Spinks . "My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on Google Play. I had just bought LOTR 4K and can't finish it. My Google Drive data is completely gone. I can't access my YouTube channel. The worst of all is losing access to my gmail address of over 15 years.
"I absolutely have not done anything to violate your terms of service, so I can take this no other way than you deciding to burn this bridge. Consider it burned. Terraria for Google Stadia is canceled. My company will no longer support any of your platforms moving forward. I will not be involved with a corporation that values their customers and partners so little. Doing business with you is a liability."
The incident would be unremarkable except that Spinks is not the first to complain of shoddy treatment in the one-sided relationship users have with tech giants and Google in particular. Users complain that it is challenging getting past automated responses, or equally uninformative responses from support, and that discovering and correcting the real reason for bans and blocks is challenging.
The impact of a disabled Google account can be considerable, not only affecting access to Google-held data such as email history and files in Drive, but also other services where a Google login is used to authenticate.
The best approach in cases where a ban is not justified is to shout loudly on social media – which is what Spinks is doing. In his case, he is also stating that he will no longer develop Terraria for Google's Stadia platform.
Earlier this month Stadia veep Phil Harrison [6]declared that it was closing its in-house studios. "We will not be investing further in bringing exclusive content from our internal development team, beyond any near-term planned games," he said. The platform itself continues, and Harrison added: "We're expanding our efforts to help game developers and publishers take advantage of our platform technology and deliver games directly to their players."
The cancellation of Terraria does not help that strategy, though whether the left hand of Google's account-blocking algorithms and the right hand of Stadia's developer platform communicate at all is unclear.
[7]
Note that we only have one side of this story so far, though we have approached Google for comment. Further, even if Spinks gets his account back, it will be little comfort to individuals who face similar issues but lack the prominence of a millions-selling games developer. ®
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[1] https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/terraria-pushes-beyond-30-million-copies-sold.86948/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YCHCiDULQOhLZcO7XkbQFQAAABA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://twitter.com/Terraria_Logic/status/1354212973376634882
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YCHCiDULQOhLZcO7XkbQFQAAABA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://twitter.com/Demilogic/status/1358661842147692549
[6] https://blog.google/products/stadia/focusing-on-stadias-future-as-a-platform-and-winding-down-sge/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YCHCiDULQOhLZcO7XkbQFQAAABA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: This is weird
It sounds like typical corporate management: set parameters for a machine default, then walk away - from here it's not worth us spending any time on it.
Re: This is weird
I have never liked the 1 account philosophy. I avoid google whenever possible, but they still get there tendrils everywhere and they then try to link up parts of my life that I have compartmentalised for a reason. They need splitting up.
Re: This is weird
Google's account system works like this:
1. Maybe something happened. Nobody's really sure, but an event showed up in a log. Maybe they had a video which violated the terms of service. Maybe someone pressed the report button by mistake and didn't fill out the form. It's all the same.
2. Send the user an email describing the problem, just so long as no details about the system are disclosed. In practice, this only really allows an email like "A possible misuse event has been detected associated in some way with your account".
3. Increment a secret internal score with a secret algorithm. Both things are so secret that not even the internal teams know what they are.
4. If the score's too high, ban their account. No need to plan to recover, since after all the code must be good enough to prevent false positives. To prove that, here's a list of times where that happened in the past five years. Look. Only sixteen people had accounts restored!
Re: This is weird
Because Google decided to trash people's YouTube accounts and force them to use a Google/Gmail account about 2 years back. So if they kill your YouTube account, then that's everything.
Re: This is weird
Yet is possible to delete the Youtube part of the account in your settings.
Stadia really seems to be in trouble
If this is the way they engage with game developers then they're screwed. And it's coming off the back of other news about cancellation of internal studios.
The saddest part in all this is Stadia had the potential to offer games that could not possibly run in the confines of a PC but they blew it. The service is basically just PC ports, and not even good value or priced in novel ways (e.g. metered gameplay) so what's the point?
Re: Stadia really seems to be in trouble
The best part is that Google just had a massive campaign where they were sending people free Stadia hardware (chromecast + controller) So long as you opened a Stadia account.
Goodbye and good riddance.
I'm sorry to hear that Spinks' issue had to go this far. But depending upon a single external company, Google no less, you support that much of your internal corporate functions is a HUGE mistake. Putting all your eggs in one basket only leads to your farm going into bankruptcy when the Big Bad Wolf decides to steal the basket.
And trusting CLOUD, no less?? Ugh.
Life's lesson: never allow yourself a single point of failure if the stakes are high. Where's your backup email addresses? An even larger question: where's your *corporate-identified* email that doesn't say 'dot gmail" at the end?? Where's your on-site backups beyond Google Drive? Did you actually depend upon Google business apps with no plan for internet interruptions?
Many questions. For the most part, it sounds like you choose poorly, padawan.
Re: Google
The terrifying thing here is that Google is starting to dominate at schools. Many people learn in Google Classroom and so everything in Google Docs. To many of the next generation Google is IT. The won't make a conscious decision to put eggs in the basket, they won't even realise that it is possible to have eggs outside the basket.
This egg metaphor went to far. Sorry
Re: Google
It sounds like he also uses one account for personal life and business. Doesn't sound like a good idea.
Re: Google
Without having different devices for each account, you don't have a choice with Google and Android. (Yes, he can probably afford to do that, but many others can't.)
Google Play is a clusterfuck of bad design and illogical choices.
Re: Google
You can totally have multiple accounts on a single android device. I even have a [1]separate work profile , which means I have twice the Play Store on the same phone, one for my personal account with my private apps and one for my work account with work apps.
[1] https://support.google.com/work/android/answer/6191949?hl=en
Having dealt with Google "support"..
Understand.
Arse and elbows come to mind.
Trying to convert an enterprise account to a charity account. To cut a VERY long story short, 20+ "experts" had no idea what to do, despite documentation saying it was a simple 3 process.
In summary "Can't convert as doesn't exist. Can't create as already exists."
It took about 30 screenshots, videos and emails, before I just eventually gave up, telling them they were useless.
I'm having trouble telling which is worse
Apple support gives you corpo-speak unless you have the patience to wait 40 minutes to get a proper technician on the phone speaking on behalf of Apple Enterprise Support - even then they can't make any solid claims lest Cupertino un-hire them. With that said, when you do get a technician, they're happy to talk in terms of x86 and ARM rather than "Intel and Apple Silicon" and are happy to take down info about bugs in terms of what you see in proper log output. Praise Steve!
Over in Redmond, they're not much better though. Just as India hit peak call centre, Microsoft had to go and ruin everything with these new African centres, filled with folks who clearly don't know what they're doing. Excellent accents, very polite but terrible service. They'll call you within 5 minutes to apologise for the wait and tell you someone will be looking into the case soon... and that their engineers will call in about an hour.. what... WHY!?
Google... oh boy. Google used to be awesome but these days they can't even answer basic questions about domains, despite being a domain registrar themselves.
Kafka
What popped into my mind reading the article was Franz Kafka's 1926 unfinished novel "The Castle". From the Wikipedia article on same
... Dark and at times surreal, The Castle is often understood to be about alienation, unresponsive bureaucracy, the frustration of trying to conduct business with non-transparent, seemingly arbitrary controlling systems, and the futile pursuit of an unobtainable goal.
Sound familiar?
Keeping the accounts seperate.
Who puts the developer/play account in the same box as their email, with the same company? Who buys apps (yeah well there's one problem right there) with the same account as the one that they use to sell others? I think that you expect this poor treatment when you are the service. They think that they own you.
Avoid Google
Simples
No login no account
No real use for them other than search
And frankly I can no longer be bothered to scroll past the paid for ads
Will not miss them, they have invented all the best bits and now they are out here we don’t need them
It's not just Google; FaceBook is no better. Having long avoided the social media thing, last month I had cause to create an account with the ugly monster. I had the account for 5 days. I wrote messages to my wife saying "Here I am. Now what do I do?" and not much else. Then a warning - I had to provide a video. Then I had to provide a photo. Then I was banned, apparently for "suspicious activity". I hate FaceBook and never wanted an account in the first place but it burns to be banned like this, nor to be able to contact anyone willing to supply reasons. All you get is "This decision is irreversible." Well, so much for my social life - phooie to the lot of em. It's back to IRC and Usenet for me. :-P
I had something similar when I opened a gmail account. First thing I did was go through the configuration settings so I could download all my gmail emails via POP3 to Thunderbird. An hour later I got a message about my account being blocked for suspicious activity. During that time all I'd done was send and receive a couple of test emails to one of my none-gmail email accounts. F**k that. Bye bye gmail.
I finally deleted my facebook account too a week ago. The noise to content ratio had become unbearable, even with blocking the ads. My video feed was 99% clickbait, trash and soft porn, with only around 1% being sci-fi short films and science documentary related which is what I really wanted to watch.
This is weird
If the problem was with the YouTube account why did it extend to everything? Did Google have their bots more powers that they should have?