[brmgb]

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.

[cableshaft]

> 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.

[8ytecoder]

We were a really low volume AWS customer. We had an account representative.

[newswasboring]

> 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]

> 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.

[hbn]

Your mileage may very depending on a variety of factors. I got a free Stadia kit (controller + Chromecast Ultra) for being a YouTube Premium/Music subscriber, and decided I'd give a good and honest attempt at playing through a full game on Stadia.

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.

[newswasboring]

> You just need to pay the game to play in 1080p...pro tier...4k and comes with free games

This has to be the most bizarrely conceived product strategy ever. I know I am not a gamer, but... who is this targeting?

[LegitShady]

I think the only way it makes sense is if you can't afford the upgrade to a new console or PC, and even then the issue is that my experience with Stadia's stability and lag make it not appropriate to play response-timing sensitive games.

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.

[tomc1985]

> I have no idea who this is for.

It's for Google, trying out rent-seeking in a consumer channel with high fixed costs

[astrange]

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.

[brmgb]

> Valve does treat game developers poorly

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.

[astrange]

> Valve definitely doesn't treat developers poorly (well their commission is too big but they are quite reasonable in how they interact with developers).

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.

[adnzzzzZ]

As an indie dev I disagree very heavily with this. Games like Hentai Nazi (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1183970/Hentai_Nazi/) are allowed to be on the store because they're generally very permissive, as long as you're following the laws that they have to follow because they're in America. If you're making games with sexual content and characters of questionable age (as many of these banned anime games do), then it's reasonable that some of them will get banned, since Valve has to obey the law.

[astrange]

Yes, those are ironically more likely to make it through because it makes it look like they’re following through on their promise to not moderate any store content. It’s all luck though, we don’t know what never made it in.

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

[fuzxi]

Do you have evidence of this still happening? I know games getting rejected for no real reason was somewhat common back around the Greenlight era, but I haven't heard anything like that since they moved to the minimum moderation system and started allowing porn games.

[astrange]

https://twitter.com/DistantValhalla/status/12561308666670325...

The difference is that now when they moderate, they call it something other than moderation and instantly permaban you and refuse to discuss it.