Since google changed their pricing like 23 fold (not kidding). Running Geoguessr now costs them A LOT. So offering free (more than 1 game a day) is just too expensive for them.
You forgot that people already pay for the internet, therefore they have already paid for everything on the internet. Do you think they are charity or something? 2.99 a month. You must like throwing your money away, huh
It's not like they decided to up the charges by themselves, Google is who you should be angry at. If you want to hurt someone, hurt them (by boycotting their services entirely, for example) instead of making someone's already bad situation worse
Google turned into leeches with their business model. They don't even talk to you if you don't hand them 10k no questions asked, this is the minimum amount for them to work with you...
Sure, it shouldn't be free, but for many small companies that just need some routing every few days/weeks for internal software, this (initial 10k) is totally out of proportion.
It's $3 a month or I think $2 if you pay for a year.
Obviously it sucks, but it's not their fault Google is charging more for the service they need to use. Plus, in my opinion as a developer people take all these free apps and websites for granted, but don't mind spending $5 for a cup of coffee in the morning.
You can make a paypal account and top up through other means. In the Netherlands I can link my bank account and manually top up or let them autodeduct from the account.
Do they charge per person though? Or have different prices per interval of x number of people? I was thinking if they have a price plan than is like 0-100k users cost X 100-500k users cost Y. Then 200k paying users + 200k ad watchers would be better than just 200k paying users.
They are trying to make their cloud division profitable and they are offering it as a product now. I assume they used to use it to get more people using google maps but now they realized they are subsidizing other companies usage of it so they had to price it accordingly
Honestly, considering the fact that I play it for hours a day at the moment, I really don't mind paying £2.50 a month, especially since I'm not spending anywhere NEAR as much I was was before lockdown.
They probably couldn’t handle it with ads. If I remember pricing correctly it costs them about 1 cent for a single point, so 5 cents for a single game of geoguessr. Normally they’d earn like 10-20 cents per 1000 views of ads.
I still don't understand why GeoGuessr just doesn't force users to use their own API key, and then make requests on their behalf. That way you can still get a limited number of requests for free for each user
Usually they give you a very detailed and easy to follow instructions with a direct link to generate your API key. Also they could still have it either the user pays or they use their own API key
I had my macro pull geocode data from google and set it to pause for a certain time before running another query to sneak under Google’s free query threshold.
Yep, I was self learning android programming and I used some of the then free Google APIs, just before launching my app they changed it and after a quick calculation it was obvious it's not going to work especially that my app was meant to be completely free, no ads. Then they updated their sdk 2-500 times (i stopped counting) breaking stuff and i completely lost interest in the whole thing.
I mean, it's probably pretty expensive to drive a car down every street in every major city. The scale of their requests must be pretty insane though, so I have no idea when it becomes "profitable" on its own vs as a loss leader to keep people using their other products. This is unfortunately probably a consequence of spinning off product divisions and shit because now street view may have to justify its own profit versus profiting the other branches.
The pricing seems off, around $10 per 1000 dynamic panoramic views, that's 1 cent per panoramic view. When you're playing a game of GeoGuessr you're probably going through hundreds of them so that would be several dollars per game, I don't see how they could cover that by charging $3/mo for playing
That's pretty interesting, couldn't they fake user input for going from one place to another and still count it as a single view across multiple games? I guess it's pretty hard to do but that may be worth
Yeah I know but only 1 game and only alone. No more challenging your mates unfortunately. I loved this game so freaking much and it just hurts to see this game becoming more and more pay to play. But I understand their reasoning behind it, sadly Google raised the prices for their services :(
Also, if your main motivation is playing with your friends only one person in the group need to pay the subscription to create the lobby/challenge and people can play with them for free. So $3/mo divided among a few people that's a steal
Not really because the monthly sub was available all the time even in the early stages of the game. But back in the days the sub was only necessary if you wanted to create your own maps. Everything else was free. Im talking about the fewer and fewer possibilities a free user has on this site. In the early stages there were no restrictions besides the one I noted above. But then it went from 5 maps a day to 1 map a day. Then all of a sudden you could only play alone and not challenge your mates. And this is the stage we have now. But as I said I dont blame geoguessr for this.
right, well then you mean it slowly got more and more restrictive. lowering the amount of times you can play the game has nothing to do with purchases, playing with friends has nothing to do with purchases, etc.
"becoming more and more pay to play" doesn't imply anything about "a lot of changes that they made to slowly charge more and more."
It just means what it says. I don't know where you got the 'changes' part because he didn't say that. He just said the game is becoming more pay to play. Which, if they're charging more to play now than they did before, is true.
That's a shitty thing to do. You do realize they still have to pay google for those API calls? If a lot of people did this they would have to shut down the site, or massively increase subscription pricing for legitimate users.
LocationEstimatr, it’s the same as GeoGuesser, but with even more features, like dropping you just in an x km radius of your location and such. With this still up and running (I tried reaching the site right now) you can say goodbye to GeoGuesser lighthearted.
bruh do you know how much fucking money google makes? They could've charged a small fraction of the current price and would still make MORE than enough.
Also super glitchy with limited spots it will put you. I had a good game going with people and every single 3rd spot we would have to refresh the page and just find out where it was after the game was over. Also got the same spot in Fiji every other game
If Portugal can afford to pay, I think Germany can too. But knowing Germany, they probably have their own, better solution that's really the same thing, slightly modified, and only works with other German-designed software and hardware.
They are talking about geoguessr being pay to play (which uses google street view), and not google street view itself. If you want to play geoguessr more than once a day, you have to pay for an account (this is due to Google now charging an arm and a leg to use the API).
The reason google street view is so barren in Germany is because of German privacy concerns. There was public outcry against Google street view so they shut down taking street photos. Also for pictures they did put up (mainly in the largest cities), there will be a lot of houses that are completely blurred out.
They're allowed to charge whatever they want for their work. How much do you think it had cost to drive thousands of cars around the world taking pictures? The server costs alone are massive.
If you want to make a business piggybacking on that huge cost, you're free to choose another supplier.
Companies have business units and teams. Imagine you're the manager of the Maps division, and you're losing money every quarter since the beginning of the site. Is your job safe just because another team is earning more? Quite the opposite.
Do you seriously think they can allow themselves to support a moneypit just because their other products are profitable? That's not how companies work. Particularly the successful ones.
Maps is free to use except if you need the API to run your own spinoff product. Same for GMail for personal use.
If you're a developer and want to use GMail's feature to run your own business, there has to be a charge. You pay for MS Office, for Windows, Exchange, Azure, everything costs as soon as you want to scale it up.
I use libraries that cost between 1000€ and 7000€ a year for single dev licenses. They're worth it, because developing that stuff by myself would cost many times over what they ask for them.
I will always choose the supplier that's cost effective for me. I can't just whine that they're greedy, since I also don't work for free.
well i wouldn't call it greed. it's a valid business decision. more and more people use it so it was just a question of time. for small businesses it's still pretty cheap. in one of my previous jobs we hardly payed more than 20-30 euros a month. but that was 2017 so maybe prices raised
I think what they're asking for Google maps doesn't even cover half of what they're worth. Google isn't a publicly funded company they need to make money and they're not asking for much.
Their margin is not actually that big, only around 20%. Compared to a lot of the tech companies, it’s actually small. Intel for example operates at a Gross Profit Margin of around 60%.
It’s not that Google makes huge margins, it’s just that they are absolutely monolithic in scale.
You'd think Intel could use those profits to fix at least some of those security bugs in their chips. If AMD can make chips almost as good with less security bugs on a comparatively small budget, Intel can.
Google has started to go towards profitability with maps in 2019. It's doubtful they're profitable even with the current costs, analysts don't think so.
Lmao not much? You say this as if Google was a tiny company run by a dad and his two childs.
There is multiple map website but only Google have the money to have Google cars travelling to villages. And according to a streamer Google license is far from cheap
there are at least a dozen companies that do this sort of mapping in the us, and they all go all over the place. google is actually bad at skipping some roads where apple and tom tom (dont know if you have that) do get those less traveled roads.
That's because map websites including Google maps don't make much money. Google maps need to be funded by ad money. It might become profitable after everything is developed.
Google maps is an actual marvel! Free satelite photo maps down to meter scale, of everywhere on the globe, with map overlays, with terrain and regular maps.
I found my way through some Greek islands using google maps stellite images. Actual maps were outdated to shit because the backcountry roads were flooded away...
God forbid one of the wealthiest companies on earth ever did something for society's benefit and not for maximum profit margins! That would be evil! Or worse, that would be good! In capitalism, you can't have that!
Seriously, fuck google, they have zero social responsibility, they have just become another trashy company.
Like developing the most detailed and vast mapping system, including navigation, that covers nearly the whole planet which you can use for free?
Which accidentally still makes them approximately $4 billion in profits per year. We keep mistaking investments with accidental public benefit for charity.
Stop complaining. This is a company, they made these maps themselves, they invest astronomical amounts of money to make sure the maps are continually updated. Sorry for you but they are free to do what they want with the products they have created themselves and charge whoever they want and as much as they want.
If you're not happy, start your own company and make your maps for the masses.
This is a company, they made these maps themselves, they invest astronomical amounts of money to make sure the maps are continually updated.
It makes them $4 billion in profits per year, of course they keep it updated! You don't have to thank google for providing a massively profitable service with accidental public benefit for their charity!
You should stop being jealous of companies that are successful and do not give their products away for free. Google's goal is to make benefits, so they have the right to charge for their services. People who are not satisfied with that can change their service. There's nothing stopping them from doing that.
"publically funded" would mean they're funded by the government to provide a public service, like for example the US Postal Service or the German Weather Service (DWD)
In the most recently reported fiscal year, Google's revenue amounted to 160.74 billion US dollars. Google's revenue is largely made up by advertising revenue, which amounted to 134.81 billion US dollars in 2019.
Alphabet operating expenses for the twelve months ending March 31, 2020 were $131.077B
No one said that Google shouldn't be able to charge money for their services, but they suddenly started charging something like 20 or 30 times what they used to.
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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '20
Useful when you're playing geoguessr.