Honestly, I like the concept of this game. If you dropped all the proper names you mentioned and just call it "Just Be Nice" it would be palatable to 1000x bigger audience. You don't need to be religiously motivated to find it challenging to be nice in particular scenarios. It's a theme I've never heard of explored and I would like to play it (but without the Mormon stuff)
I guess that doesn't resonate as much with me. Your point is totally fair, and maybe people would like your idea a lot more. Despite my atheism, I'm much more intrigued about a game that's more from a particular point of view and I just don't have a problem with characters that are religious. A more culturally homogenous game might be less appealing to me. I'm sure it could be done right, though. The Mormon aspect, I thought, would give such a game a lot of interesting gameplay scenarios out-of-the-box that wouldn't be as easy to explain in a more generic game.
FWIW: I think most members of the LDS church have a good sense of humor for things like this done in good taste, even if they're not 100% representative of their beliefs.
source: am one myself. This is true for the other members around me as well (friends, family, etc)
I am imagining they are aliens instead of Mormons, but they look exactly like humans. Maybe they moved here (secretely, of course) because some other mean aliens have taken over their planet. Since they are unfailingly nice, they just left their planet instead of fighting for it. Now they're here on earth and dealing with humanity's response to their niceness.
Firebase is Google. I don't know why they deserve different levels of trust. If Firebase has your permission to harvest your sync info, there is no reason to think this doesn't get copied right on over into googles 'track every click and movement' apparatus.
Firebase is Google, yes, and the name of a suite of mobile-related products. They have ML Kit, Crash analytics, configuration management, auth etc.
Also, Firebase Cloud Messaging is the only way to have push notifications on Android.
Using either of their products ( outside of Firebase Analytics and maybe Firebase Auth) isn't tracking users and isn't harvesting user data. It's using tools to make apps, that's it.
This assumes you're trusting Google. Technically you are still sending a lot of data to them (IP address and persistent identifier, which would allow them to correlate other info they gather from other sources) and they have the capability to use it for nefarious purposes if they decide.
Google is a malicious actor as a result of their business model and has already demonstrated their willingness to breach the GDPR with the non-compliant tracking consent prompts they use on their services, so it isn't that far-fetched to believe they can also use data from other services in ways you don't expect, especially when they can have plausible deniability.
The Firebase Data Processing and Security Terms [1] (section 5.2.1) limit Google's usage of any data they obtain through Firebase and would seem to prevent that sort of tracking.
there are a lot of people in the "not that great" and "still into it I guess" camps. Those just don't make headlines. Also, some morons can only read headlines. Don't worry, the world is not as idiotic as the headline writers and readers.
In this case, someone who made a playlist. Reputation of the knowledge and tastes of the playlist maker would normally matter, but since this is purely a numbers game at this point the only thing that matters is the number of followers on the list made. "Curator" makes a list of popular songs, gets a bunch of followers on the playlist, then sells placement on the list. "Curator" has really lost it's meaning here.
Just don't use public playlists. You can already disable explicit. Disable "autoplay similar songs when your music ends". This is Spotify itself selling playlist placement though, not public playlists being manipulated for payola. No one can stop payola on a public list, just don't use public lists.
I've been a paying user of Spotify for years and I think that happened maybe once. It is not a pervasive problem.
I believe this option is controlled at the app level, not the account level, and is enabled by default in the app. So you have to disable it when you first install the app but after that it isn't re-enabled.
In the past I’ve copied playlists, but the UI on the iPhone doesn’t seem to make it obvious. Search favours playlists over albums too.
It means I have to use my decision making part of my brain, which is not what I want to do when listening to music, and as that’s the part of my brain which will decide to cancel, it’s not something Spotify want me to do either.
From my brief experience with YouTube Music, the problem seemed to be even worse there. It wasn't just poorly curated public playlists, it seemed that much of the time it was playing poorly edited unauthorised YouTube uploads of songs.
That's interesting, I thought public playlist listeners would just use YouTube. If not to have access to your own musical choices, what is the point of Spotify?
It plays in the background and is a couple quid cheaper than YouTube's play in background "feature" that totally worked before but was nerfed when they introduced YouTube Premium
Integration with Alexa etc is useful too now that I'm already in the system but I could easily use Amazon's thing there, or Apple's if I fancied swapping Alexa out for Siri
As far as I know, this is also an image commonly used in machine learning tutorials for image classification of species of flowers. I don't know if the tutorials use the mediawiki source directly though. I do recognize this image though. I think it's in the SciKit Learn O'Reilly book.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
