GeoGuessr's Steam Release Hit With Overwhelmingly Negative Reviews For "Completely Pointless" Monetization

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.
- 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).
- 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
- 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.

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
- .
  
  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.)

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.
  
  I will thank both for no business with either of them.

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've been starting to use Geostatic instead, it looks like a really nice alternative to Geoguesser, their economic model looks a lot nicer.

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
Haven't looked into this but if steam is the exact same game as the web version then it's worth the subscription fee. In fact geoguessr and tidal are the only two subscription services I pay for. Studying the map makes you way smarter

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 always thought that given that personal use of google street maps os free for the user. It would be really easy to just make a copy of that game for free relying on scrapping instead of api calls.
Insert chad scrapper vs virgin API user meme.

Geoguesser is way too proud of their product to be charging money for it.

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
- 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
- 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
- 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 🤦
- 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
- 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.
  
  There still needs to be some way for the devs to pay the server costs and API costs. What I'm suggesting is a way for the user to sell their processing power to them instead of paying an irritating $2 every month. And while the price of cryptocurrencies vary, they don't vary fast enough to make mining profits (if you sell the coins as you produce them) unpredictable
- Nobody wants a shitcoin miner taking resources on their machine
- There are several issues with that.
  First and foremost. Most people's devices are not powerful enough to make any money mining any cryptocurrency.
  Also a cryptominer is not "free real state" it chugs the computer. The user would have a terrible experience trying to do anything with a cryptominer on the background.
  And finally, there are many free software out there. Not everything is to be monetized. Some things should just be free. I have done plenty of free things for others to enjoy, it's not the end of the world, quite the opposite is quite rewarding.
  
  First and foremost. Most people’s devices are not powerful enough to make any money mining any cryptocurrency.
  That depends on the currency. Miners working on something like bitcoin have to compete with massive corporations who construct special ASIC chips that have vastly higher hash rates, making it impossible for anyone who isn't using such a chip to create any profit. Some currencies, like Monero (XMR) use special hash functions designed is such a way that custom mining hardware for them cant be constructed, and so mining can only happen on cpus. Because of this, its actually possible to make money mining Monero. There's a benchmark for the hash rates of various cpus, and here's a link to convert that to projected profits. My PC can calculate 3500 hashes per second, and this translates into USD 0.0045 per hour. That might not seem like much, but if you add together all the money that would be produced by all the players in this game, it would become substantial.
  Also a cryptominer is not “free real state” it chugs the computer. The user would have a terrible experience trying to do anything with a cryptominer on the background.
  That all depends on how many threads the miner is running. I honestly wouldn't be able tell if I'm running 2 threads of a Monero miner on my PC unless I look at my task manager - its really not that intensive at that level. Now of course, if it was using the full power of my cpu, I would be a lot hard to do any other task on it, but it doesn't need to run at full power like that.
  And finally, there are many free software out there. Not everything is to be monetized. Some things should just be free. I have done plenty of free things for others to enjoy, it’s not the end of the world, quite the opposite is quite rewarding.
  I agree and this game costs something to run, all the server costs and the API costs, and there needs to be some way of paying for that. I suppose it could become free if it was sustained with donations, and in that case having the option to run a miner like this on the client could be a way to add to that, giving the user the option to donate their computing power if they wanted to.
- 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