@EA_Mako - thanks a lot for getting back to us and explaining the reasons. It's expected that it takes time until established gaming platforms adapt to the upcoming era of cloud gaming, and while it's considered a niche today, it will become more and more common place over the next couple of years. Why? For starters, it brought me back to gaming. And I'm sure I'm not alone. Removing the high bar of entry of buying the latest console or a state of the art PC to run games on high/ultra settings can blow the already impressive market revenues out of the water. Cloud gaming companies will benefit, for sure, but so will you guys at EA/Origin/Steam/etc.. - just let us buy the game digitally and play it.
As far as I'm concerned - and I'm sure many millennials and GenZ too - buying a console or a PC is a bad investment, almost as bad as buying a new car: at the time of purchase it has lost at least 20% of its value. Financials aside, it's more economical - and greener for that matter - to run servers in data centres which can use the combination of electricity grid and renewables for their operations, as opposed to most homes in the world right now. So please, just let us buy games, and play without hiccups.
Given its early days, it's fair to say that cloud gaming is incompatible with your fraud detection system. But it's not Customer Obsessed. You're hurting an increasing number of cloud gaming customers by penalising them due to false positive fraud detection signals. If Ubisoft managed to figure it out (I do own and play through them on GFN), so can you guys. To draw parallels, it's almost as if I could only open my webmail from X number of computers on a single day. Sure, gmail will ask for 2FA to make sure it's not a fraud, but it doesn't lock me out, even if I'm just a free customer, let alone a paying one. The world solved these problems 25 years ago, and thus, so can you guys.
Ideas:
1. Struck a deal with GeforceNow and use their IP ranges to detect cloud gaming, so that you don't generate false positives
2. Instead of detecting multiple attempts to play from different computers in a given time-period, detect if the gaming activity is ongoing in parallel. It's not hard to do, given you require internet access for your games already (heartbeat signals, anyone?)
3. Realise the fact that if someone wants to play your games in a pirated way, they will. Penalising paying customers is not the answer. In fact, it's a step back to the dark ages...
I do appreciate your efforts for looking into it. Please let us play.
Best,
Peter
