Comment by 3327

5 years ago

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.

    • 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.

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  • 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?

    • 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.

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.

    • Yep. Also the approval process on Stadia is very complex and you need to set up so.much.stuff. It's not like their playstore where you can release almost anything. Even if you have an already fully working game on Stadia, just the process of meeting all technical requirements and setting up the pages on the backend and all the hooks can take months. It's far too much effort for something that wouldn't even go through the submission process, or if it did it would be removed immediately.

      Same reason why you don't see knock offs on Playstation - the approval process is complex, very long and pretty costly.

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  • > 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.

    • 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...

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    • 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?