Comment by pedrogpimenta
5 years 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
1 reply →
> 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.
5 replies →
Valve does treat game developers poorly, and it can’t be fixed because their no-internal-structure setup means nobody can actually change anything at the company. 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. Kind of a problem when the newer younger people into anime aesthetic are also the ones making all the LGBT content.
6 replies →
Many smaller devs have pivoted to leverage alternative platforms like Itch, Epic Games Store, Game Pass, etc alongside Steam for monetization, and some have ditched Steam entirely based on complaints with Valve's developer relations and pricing. Valve seems unlikely to ever make any concessions to win back the hearts of smaller developers, but they did panic once Epic Games Store and other storefronts started capturing exclusives for large titles by offering big studios a reduced cut (20-25% in some cases) to keep them around.
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.
His post implies he's dropping support for all Google platforms, presumably including Android, where Terraria is consistently one of the top selling games. That seems like a much more difficult decision.
It's interesting you don't consider Android one of Google's platforms.
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?".
Good on him. Takes courage and an established product to do this.
Good example of standing up.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
7 replies →
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?
1 reply →
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
4 replies →
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?
The Stadia version is the one cancelled. I doubt Google doesn't have a tougher screening process for games for Stadia, since they are the ones running the game. It is highly improbable that a knockoff game will land on it.
2 replies →
> 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.
If that happens, they should sue Google for dealing in counterfeit goods.
They’ll have a ridiculously strong case.
3 replies →