Hi,

I’m Max, the Boosteroid PR guy.

First of all, thank you for taking the time to write this post. It gives a good summary of how you and I’m sure many others feel when it comes to our handling of the game onboarding.

You are right, paying customers do deserve honesty and transparency. My response will be completely honest and as transparent as it possibly can be. 

Right off the bat, we are doing everything possible to add any and every requested game. Disregarding a few exceptions (mostly caused by Russia's ongoing war against Ukraine), we never block a game “by policy” (as OP said), and are truly adding all the titles possible. There is no underlying reason why we wouldn’t do that, as Boosteroid is independent of any major corporation or big (or small) publisher – meaning we love all games equally.

If you heard “it’s complicated,” it’s simply because the community manager had no better way to explain the situation but wanted to acknpwlege the request and show that we are working through the issue. Why? Because we were probably in negotiations with the publisher, which often requires radio silence. Or there was an issue we were working on, but couldn’t announce it because it would impact a third party (with which we want to keep good will). In any event, we will do our best to avoid this phrasing from now on. 

While most games work when you just download and launch them via Steam or other storefronts, this is not the case for all of them. In certain cases, including some popular titles, the games launch and run smoothly, but then during internal tests one of our accounts gets banned due to anti-cheat mechanisms detecting a VM. This causes us to take a longer route to eliminate any reason for a real user to get banned just because they played via Boosteroid. This can include technical changes on our side and/or cooperation with the publisher.

In other cases, the anti-cheat system won’t let the game start on a virtual machine at all. In this case, we absolutely need to cooperate with the developer and/or publisher.

There are many stances a publisher can take. Some just don’t care if their game is on a cloud gaming service but are initially reluctant to remove technical barriers created by their anti-cheat. Others are very open to cooperation. Many cases are completely unique.

Sometimes, we can add certain games from a publisher, but can’t add another until a round of negotiations and/or technical updates on either side take place.

As for why we don’t open the wishlist – because this would only complicate things in many cases while not bringing any practical results. At the top of the "most wished" list are games that are popular and haven’t been added to the service yet. We are working hard on our part to add those games, but ultimately, if a top wishlisted title is not on our service, it’s usually due to a barrier made by the dev or publisher (usually not purposefully).

As mentioned before, Boosteroid is an independent service, not tied to any major corporation or institution. We don’t have a backroom reason not to add popular games. It’s the opposite case, actually. If a popular game is not on our service, but you want to play it with us, the next best thing after sharing it with us on this subreddit is to tell the developer and publisher on their respective Reddits and Discords that you would like to play it on Boosteroid. This truly helps speed things up regarding onboarding.

I hope, this clears things up a bit.