Welp
Blame Google, that’s what it costs to use their api. Once upon a time geoguessr was free but Google and their infinite money took it away from the few people who even played the game back then
Geoguesser is way too proud of their product to be charging money for it.
I’ve been starting to use Geostatic instead, it looks like a really nice alternative to Geoguesser, their economic model looks a lot nicer.
I had to look way too hard just to figure out what the fuck the monetization scheme is on that article that kept repeating the headline 3 times, holy shit
I think it was obvious that it was never going to be a free game again. The problem is making it look like it’s free to play and then hitting the player with a paywall after a few games. Also, the subscription model is shitty. I would readily put down a onetime payment for something that works as least as good as the web version, which is a lot more polished than the free alternatives I’ve seen. But I refuse to buy into this subscription model.
You can thank Google for that - they are charging for every API call. A one time payment would either have to be ridiculously high, or it could ruin GeoGuessr.
Players can only access the lowest rank of competitive gameplay for free, and access to any higher levels costs a subscription fee of $2.50 a month. That’s right, you’ll need a subscription to play GeoGuessr on Steam, for some reason.
Not only is this price point bizarre for a game that you can literally just hop into similar browser versions and play for free, but […]
GeoGuessr has required a subscription to actually play for a while now. I think they had a very limited Free tier until 2024, but it was not a great experience. The developers claim that they need to charge a subscription fee because they need to pay Google for the Streetview API access. To me, that seems plausible and would justify a subscription model (as opposed to a one-time purchase).
On the other hand, OpenGuessr seems to be a free alternative that offers a very similar game. That certainly seems like a better alternative if it’s sustainable.
Geotastic is another great alternative that is funded by donations and ads (which you can remove by donating once)
They also show you how much API calls cost you incurred, which is nice. That way I know how much of my donation only offsets what I use and how much I actually donate to development
I understand the subscription model is required since every player is bound to cost them money for every round, but apparently even if you’re already subscribed to GeoGuessr you have to pay again for the Steam version which is absurd to me.
Yeah, that seems quite weird and not customer friendly at all. I was wondering if it has something to do with Steam’s in-game purchase conditions (mostly the fee).
I’m not sure if it’s just because Ubisoft has a special contract but for Trackmania I’m able to pay the subscription either through Ubisoft directly or through Steam.
The steam version of trackmania is quite weird - I looked for a way to pay for it through steam for a while before resignedly going into the Ubisoft payment in the overlay… Only to be directed to steam for payment. I’m not sure if it’s even possible to pay through Ubisoft when launching it from steam.
Yeah I enjoyed GeoGuessr and wishlisted it in Steam when it was announced. Got an email from Steam saying it was available and opened the store page to see the overwhelmingly negative reviews.
I’ve played OpenGuessr and it’s pretty close to the same experience, I never do versus or anything, just a casual player. I did notice it tended to put me in the same countries quite often, like 8 instances of Brazil and 3 in the Philippines in 20 rounds, but still enjoyable.
A flat subscription fee is blameless.
Don’t make it sound like they added $50 hats.
People, their service has material costs, and the fee is minuscule.
This is a completely above-board business model. This is not the bottomless pit of “microtransactions” that needs to become illegal. It’s how you’re supposed to fund a thing that costs money to run.
I’m assuming it has to do with paying for the Google map api calls. If that’s what it is they should say so if that’s not what it is they are scummy
i wonder if they could use one of the open alternatives
Playing a game like this involves a heavier server load compared to normal use, right? Would that incur a significant cost to said alternative? (I don’t actually know how the magic box works.)
since its open i’m assuming you can download the data and host it yourself, freeing the regular public server not made for these requests. and that it would probably be cheaper than paying google for api calls.
don’t quote me on any of that though, quite a bunch of assumptions off the top of my weary head. i’m not versed on the specifics of this magic box either and was hoping for someone who does to chime in.
I don’t think there’s a way to get the street view images that are needed. Those are owned by google.
shit yeah you are correct. i was thinking about just mapping.
in my defense i’m sleep deprived.
society should normalize having crypto-miners in software, like as an official method of monetization that the user consents to
that would actually fix most of our problems, no ads, no subscrption fees
I don’t see a downside to this
edit: if you disagree with me on this, reply. I wanna debate this
You can already mine on your own and use that money to pay for stuff if it’s viable. This is just displacing the subscription into your electricity bill.
ik, but it would just be more practical to combine the several steps of mining separately, converting the currency, and then paying for the subscription into a single process. Just the option of this would be nice ngl
Counter-point:
crypto-mining should be illegal, period. (and so should AI)
We’re on the brink of climate collapse, we as a species can’t afford to waste massive amounts of electricity on something that literally creates no value.we as a species can’t afford to waste massive amounts of electricity on something that literally creates no value.
its the fault of the miner if they’re using non-environmental friendly energy sources. if you don’t wanna create emissions, just use solar power.
literally creates no value.
I don’t really see how. if it can be sold for something of value, it has value. crypto might be useless to you, but to some people out there a single Bitcoin is worth more than 80 thousand dollars, so if you have a few Bitcoin, even though to you they might be useless, you can sell them for money
This feels like a technical approach for a solution to a political problem. We shouldn’t normalize a solution to a predatory approach that companies have, we should regulate so that the approach can’t be taken by companies on the first place, we should foster competition so that those who do are going to be outcompeted etc.
Wasting even more electricity to compute numbers used in an unstable speculative market with no clear future is IMHO a completely wrong approach to the problem.
My electricity bill would like to have a word
I bet most of the upvotes are from people who consider crypto mining to be “free money” because they don’t pay their own electric bills.
But would it cost more to pay for the extra electricity or for the product? At least for the electricity you could invest in solar and lower your bill dramatically
That sounds terrible. Also a lot of games use the gpu so you probably don’t want to share it with mining at the same time
the randomX hash function Monero uses runs on the CPU, not the gpu
it could just use like 1-2 threads if the game is taking a lot of processing power
edit: if ur gonna mass downvote me, say why 🤦
Nobody wants a shitcoin miner taking resources on their machine
I don’t think its a horrible idea but maybe have an option for purchase, ads, or crypto. But yeah people are going to hate you for this comment 🤣
I don’t think its a horrible idea but maybe have an option for purchase, ads, or crypto.
that’s what I’m thinking, but additionally having a option to directly ‘sell’ your computing power should also be an option
But yeah people are going to hate you for this comment 🤣
actually though. I haven’t been on Lemmy for too long but this might be the most downvotes ive gotten on a comment
Congratulations. It happens. I didn’t think it was too bad an idea. What if steam ran the miner to produce steam bux?
That would be a huge waste of ressources. We as humans need to switch to carbon-free energy sources and should not start wasting ressources on mining “steam bux”.
We as humans need to switch to carbon-free energy sources
crypto mining doesn’t need to create carbon. if a miner creates emissions, that’s on them for not using solar
Opportunity costs still exist
I totally disagree here. First of all, the initial proposal was for the steam client to mine crypto. The client has no idea where its electricity comes from. And no grid is using 100% renewables, so its currently better to feed your solar power into the grid than to waste it on crypto
The client has no idea where its electricity comes from.
If the client cared to find out, they could just find out. Regardless of mining they’re creating emissions if its not green, so its not even that big of a problem. You could use this same argument to say that using microwaves is bad because the electricity they use isn’t entirely green.
I would pay good dollar money to be this stupid.
Do you think solar panels come from thin air? How is that going to do anything but offset renewable adoption?
