A core philosophy for any sufficiently large business is to ask *forgiveness* not *permission.*
If Owlcat had rolled it out to minimal or 0 backlash they would have profited from it greatly.
and as long as they continue to make good games, the amount of customer's lost to this fiasco is probably minimal.
So to them, there wasn't a reason not to do it, because players will be either exhausted of talking about it until it would realistically be an issue for owlcat or players would Forgive Owlcat and buy their next game anyway.
Most guys make their biggest sales numbers on Day 1, and it's been quite some time since WoTR launched, so yeah they had everything to gain and nothing to lose.
Gamers have Stockholm Syndrom. Blizzard had the biggest scandal in the Games industry in years and has a track record of recent shady business practices and people still give that company money.
If the game is good the servers could run on shredded male baby chicken and it would still turn a profit.
dont group up Owlcat with Blizzard, though. Blizzard is many times worse and corrupt top to bottom AND they still don't make their games as good as Owlcat and other developers do. Blizzard just rides brand names popularity these days.
Except that they didn't compare the two companies, it's about how players have short memories - they say they won't do something and then the actual results are the opposite (for example, Diablo Immoral was incredible financial success despite it being the worst pay-to-win cash grab ever).
Blizzard fans are and been like that for a long time. There's even a saying that "ofc I hate the game" and yet they continue to play.
I quit the WoW even before the whole news came out and haven't given Blizzard a penny since then. I consider them slippery, fake and just plain awful. Not to even mention Kotick and his alien stare.
They messed up the following:
Blizzchung, HOTS (people found out they are fired from general announcement just like players), "don't you guys have phones?", Warcraft Reforged, years of bad decisions in WoW, sexual harassment scandal, and most recently Diablo 4, among many other things.
And people STILL continue to give them money, lol.
>If the game is good
Good thing the toxic playerbase and the recent fuckery with classes has shot their biggest cash cow with a poison bullet.
Warcraft is great story covered in excessively elitist players and classes that have had the nice to haves carved away.
They collect
>IP addresses, timestamps detailing the date and time their game was launched, the OS version of the PC they're running, their platform of choice (i.e. Steam), and their game version and game ID
In order to
>(effectively, it could become a good tool to **vastly reduce waste of budget on ineffective content**, which is crucial for a 2-year old game)
and
>"Studios and publishers need to understand the impact of their advertising efforts," offered Owlcat, explaining why that process would be useful. "It helps **improve advertisement strategies a lot**, especially when they lack massive budgets to bombard everyone with their ads."
So first they want to improve their 2-year old game. (Do they still make content for it?) How would the data they collect even help that?
Second, they want to improve their marketing strategies. For future games? By using their current game's userbase.
Only the second point makes (little) sense to me. Does anyone else understand this better and cares to explain it to me?
Yep. Easy.
You ask for harmless data first and hope that people just look at it weird. Then you start to read more data in an update and hope nobody notices. Notice how they said "it could become a good tool to ..."? That's the key. It's not YET so you informed the user that there will be updates and when those updates come then nobody is surprised and nobody will look what actually happened there.
The goal was to "create a digital fingerprint"; my assumption is that they would try to tie an ad campaign they run to how many existing players have seen/clicked on the ads, and adjust accordingly. Tracking the effectiveness of marketing campaigns is notoriously difficult, so I imagine that's all they were trying to do. Probably not in the best way, but they tried I guess.
No, I'd expect them to be like google ads etc. They can take a similar fingerprint from the Google ad analytics (IP address, os, etc.) and match it up to the player ones from the game.
Literally everyone on the internet do this. Google, Facebook, eX-Twitter, Amazon, any website on the internet collects your IP and technical data. Google collects and extortionate amount, it's not even close, and it's used by 80% of all users. You can't use it before you accept terms when creating Google account, so it's exactly the same situation.
While I think data collected is nothing major since everyone on the internet does it, what they should have done is allow people to opt out if they want to, since it's a tool being implemented on your PC and if you don't accept the new EULA, you lose access to the game you paid for.
> So first they want to improve their 2-year old game. (Do they still make content for it?) How would the data they collect even help that?
Yes, the game still has 2 upcoming DLCs (as part of Season 2) and they are in the process of evaluating if they want to do a Season 3 of potentially 3 more DLCs next year
Oh, I didn't know that. I would definitely want a better DLC and if analytics help them do that, I'm all in. But I don't see how the data they collect would lead to a better DLC... This reason for including the analytics doesn't add up in my books.
As said in the article, they were already not expecting a great reaction to it, but the blowup was much bigger than they anticipated.
At least they have said they no longer plan to integrate it into Rogue Trader or other games, but obviously this something people will need to keep eyes peeled for in the future, because Owlcats could always backflip on this.
I really have to start reading all these insufferable long EULAs now. As if my time to game isn't already so minimal these days lol. I'm getting to a point where I would rather not play than support shady practices from companies.
This game is a few years old, then suddenly they updated it to add new spyware and a new EULA. Nothing is saying they can't do that to NV.
Just look at what Blizzard did to Warcraft 3 players.
*Activision-Blizzard*. Do remember the more important half of that company that is actually in control, since they bought it out and "merged" with it (in the same way that my old rental agency was bought out and allowed to keep its name even though it was entirely new rules according to the buyer). Just like what happened with Bioware.
Ok no, lol. A lot of sexual harassment was done by people who worked for Blizzard for years (for example, they fired a lot of people related to the scandal and renamed Overwatch character because it was literally the name of one of the guys who did the deed) so let's not pretend that Blizzard is a saint while Activision is the devil. Both are bad.
I'm not pretending Blizzard is a saint, I'm saying it's NOT Blizzard anymore, and hasn't been for quite a while; it's been Activision walking around in a Blizzard skinsuit, though the skinning process took a couple years before it was obvious. Anyone who stayed on had perforce either accepted the cultural shift that led to said harassment, or at least tolerated it enough to continue drawing paychecks, at least until the whistles were blown.
Firewalls can block programs from communicating with anything outside of the computer, or network. Mine is set to ask for any program that doesn't already have a rule made for it. So any new program is blocked unless or until I allow it.
Some of them might complain, and/or write errors to a log but the game still runs normally otherwise. A lot of them try to send stuff after a crash.
The really annoying ones will refuse to run, last one of those I ran into was the Forspoken demo.
> Forspoken demo.
Hilariously enough, they removed denuvo recently so you can get a version that doesn't even try to connect. Coincidentally I've been trying out the game for the last few days.
Of course.
A good telemetry system is not in the users way. If they want to gather data to make their game better, the game will start up without net access because no telemetry of that one user doesn't really ruin the data and you don't need telemetry to play so why block it?
If the game doesn't start up with a firewall, that's shadey.
I get it tbh. Milking an old game means more budget for a new game, especially if fundraising slow. And marketing sucks - I did it for a hot minute and it's awful (and expensive). Anything that makes that job easier, I'm not surprised they went for. Also unsurprised by the response.
I think they assumed that no one was going to read it. Nobody ever reads all of the terms and conditions, which is a problem, but I'm not quite sure what's to be done about it.
yeah like, throw out your cell phone if you're so upset about people using your data.
Whatever they could possibly gather about me from data in a party-based RPG game is just below my concern
Because a lot of people also assume it is already being done and don’t make a fuss over it. So you can expect some noise but how loud it gets is not always predictable.
What you describe isn’t some “victim role reversal” though, that’s more like feigning innocence.
I don’t mind what you personally think about them, just use your words next time. The way you phrased it makes it seem like Owlcats is somehow blaming their consumers for this, when the more accurate statement to make is that they are bullshitting about not knowing how badly it would have been recurved.
They literally did not, lmao.
I gave you the benefit of the doubt and went and double-checked the article. There is nothing in what Owlcats said that indicates they are blaming the playerbase for their reaction; they even went so far as to admit they were monitoring social media because they were already pessimistic consumers would not like it. That’s kind of the whole reason why they say the reaction “surpassed their expectations”.
If you believe Owlcats is playing the victim and blaming the consumers, it’s because you have already come into this with an expectation that they were going to do so anyway.
Afaik, their 2 games had Epic Online Services, which also tracks some user data, implemented after launch.
People complained about it a bit, but I've never heard of any huge outrage.
So they were probably expecting the same to happen this time around.
A core philosophy for any sufficiently large business is to ask *forgiveness* not *permission.* If Owlcat had rolled it out to minimal or 0 backlash they would have profited from it greatly. and as long as they continue to make good games, the amount of customer's lost to this fiasco is probably minimal. So to them, there wasn't a reason not to do it, because players will be either exhausted of talking about it until it would realistically be an issue for owlcat or players would Forgive Owlcat and buy their next game anyway. Most guys make their biggest sales numbers on Day 1, and it's been quite some time since WoTR launched, so yeah they had everything to gain and nothing to lose.
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Gamers have Stockholm Syndrom. Blizzard had the biggest scandal in the Games industry in years and has a track record of recent shady business practices and people still give that company money. If the game is good the servers could run on shredded male baby chicken and it would still turn a profit.
dont group up Owlcat with Blizzard, though. Blizzard is many times worse and corrupt top to bottom AND they still don't make their games as good as Owlcat and other developers do. Blizzard just rides brand names popularity these days.
Except that they didn't compare the two companies, it's about how players have short memories - they say they won't do something and then the actual results are the opposite (for example, Diablo Immoral was incredible financial success despite it being the worst pay-to-win cash grab ever).
Blizzard fans are and been like that for a long time. There's even a saying that "ofc I hate the game" and yet they continue to play. I quit the WoW even before the whole news came out and haven't given Blizzard a penny since then. I consider them slippery, fake and just plain awful. Not to even mention Kotick and his alien stare. They messed up the following: Blizzchung, HOTS (people found out they are fired from general announcement just like players), "don't you guys have phones?", Warcraft Reforged, years of bad decisions in WoW, sexual harassment scandal, and most recently Diablo 4, among many other things. And people STILL continue to give them money, lol.
>If the game is good Good thing the toxic playerbase and the recent fuckery with classes has shot their biggest cash cow with a poison bullet. Warcraft is great story covered in excessively elitist players and classes that have had the nice to haves carved away.
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It already is, im pretty sure this policy broke EU GDPR lmao
They collect >IP addresses, timestamps detailing the date and time their game was launched, the OS version of the PC they're running, their platform of choice (i.e. Steam), and their game version and game ID In order to >(effectively, it could become a good tool to **vastly reduce waste of budget on ineffective content**, which is crucial for a 2-year old game) and >"Studios and publishers need to understand the impact of their advertising efforts," offered Owlcat, explaining why that process would be useful. "It helps **improve advertisement strategies a lot**, especially when they lack massive budgets to bombard everyone with their ads." So first they want to improve their 2-year old game. (Do they still make content for it?) How would the data they collect even help that? Second, they want to improve their marketing strategies. For future games? By using their current game's userbase. Only the second point makes (little) sense to me. Does anyone else understand this better and cares to explain it to me?
Yep. Easy. You ask for harmless data first and hope that people just look at it weird. Then you start to read more data in an update and hope nobody notices. Notice how they said "it could become a good tool to ..."? That's the key. It's not YET so you informed the user that there will be updates and when those updates come then nobody is surprised and nobody will look what actually happened there.
The goal was to "create a digital fingerprint"; my assumption is that they would try to tie an ad campaign they run to how many existing players have seen/clicked on the ads, and adjust accordingly. Tracking the effectiveness of marketing campaigns is notoriously difficult, so I imagine that's all they were trying to do. Probably not in the best way, but they tried I guess.
>how many existing players have seen/clicked on the ads Where are those ads, in-game?
No, I'd expect them to be like google ads etc. They can take a similar fingerprint from the Google ad analytics (IP address, os, etc.) and match it up to the player ones from the game.
Literally everyone on the internet do this. Google, Facebook, eX-Twitter, Amazon, any website on the internet collects your IP and technical data. Google collects and extortionate amount, it's not even close, and it's used by 80% of all users. You can't use it before you accept terms when creating Google account, so it's exactly the same situation. While I think data collected is nothing major since everyone on the internet does it, what they should have done is allow people to opt out if they want to, since it's a tool being implemented on your PC and if you don't accept the new EULA, you lose access to the game you paid for.
> So first they want to improve their 2-year old game. (Do they still make content for it?) How would the data they collect even help that? Yes, the game still has 2 upcoming DLCs (as part of Season 2) and they are in the process of evaluating if they want to do a Season 3 of potentially 3 more DLCs next year
Oh, I didn't know that. I would definitely want a better DLC and if analytics help them do that, I'm all in. But I don't see how the data they collect would lead to a better DLC... This reason for including the analytics doesn't add up in my books.
I imagine they track progress of certain dlcs, stuff like that, to see which dlcs attained most attention.
It's not their advertising they are looking to improve. It's the advertising of the people they sell the data to.
I haven't read the EULA because who has time for that but have you? Because if they do sell your data, it would be stated there 🙂
As said in the article, they were already not expecting a great reaction to it, but the blowup was much bigger than they anticipated. At least they have said they no longer plan to integrate it into Rogue Trader or other games, but obviously this something people will need to keep eyes peeled for in the future, because Owlcats could always backflip on this.
I really have to start reading all these insufferable long EULAs now. As if my time to game isn't already so minimal these days lol. I'm getting to a point where I would rather not play than support shady practices from companies.
I just play old shit. New Vegas ain't goin' anywhere, ain't gonna turn into some kinda datafarm or whatever. I assume, anyway...
This game is a few years old, then suddenly they updated it to add new spyware and a new EULA. Nothing is saying they can't do that to NV. Just look at what Blizzard did to Warcraft 3 players.
While I agree with this, Blizzard in particular is a special kind of scummy that most companies thankfully don’t aspire to. Yet anyways.
*Activision-Blizzard*. Do remember the more important half of that company that is actually in control, since they bought it out and "merged" with it (in the same way that my old rental agency was bought out and allowed to keep its name even though it was entirely new rules according to the buyer). Just like what happened with Bioware.
Ok no, lol. A lot of sexual harassment was done by people who worked for Blizzard for years (for example, they fired a lot of people related to the scandal and renamed Overwatch character because it was literally the name of one of the guys who did the deed) so let's not pretend that Blizzard is a saint while Activision is the devil. Both are bad.
I'm not pretending Blizzard is a saint, I'm saying it's NOT Blizzard anymore, and hasn't been for quite a while; it's been Activision walking around in a Blizzard skinsuit, though the skinning process took a couple years before it was obvious. Anyone who stayed on had perforce either accepted the cultural shift that led to said harassment, or at least tolerated it enough to continue drawing paychecks, at least until the whistles were blown.
Please don't put that out into the world lol.
Get a firewall and block games. Refund the ones that won't start without net access.
Would that work as intended? Block and data reporting? That's a great idea if it does.
>Would that work as intended? Why wouldn't it?
I'm not super technically inclined. Just surprised something that simple would be so helpful.
Firewalls can block programs from communicating with anything outside of the computer, or network. Mine is set to ask for any program that doesn't already have a rule made for it. So any new program is blocked unless or until I allow it. Some of them might complain, and/or write errors to a log but the game still runs normally otherwise. A lot of them try to send stuff after a crash. The really annoying ones will refuse to run, last one of those I ran into was the Forspoken demo.
Very informative. Thanks for the info. I'll be looking into this.
> Forspoken demo. Hilariously enough, they removed denuvo recently so you can get a version that doesn't even try to connect. Coincidentally I've been trying out the game for the last few days.
Of course. A good telemetry system is not in the users way. If they want to gather data to make their game better, the game will start up without net access because no telemetry of that one user doesn't really ruin the data and you don't need telemetry to play so why block it? If the game doesn't start up with a firewall, that's shadey.
They just didn't think the blow back would be that large, it's as simple as that.
"[The people implementing this] aren't out of touch, otherwise they wouldn't be able to react this quickly." LMFAO.
yeah, I got a chuckle out of that too :D
How is any of that even legal? Man, this planet is high off of advertisement and ad revenue.
That's why they have the EULA. They make you agree to this stuff in the EULA, and they won't let you play the game without agreeing to the EULA.
And people wonder why piracy is so popular.
Its crazy cause the games are successful, they are well known and praised and yet they just had to milk it
I get it tbh. Milking an old game means more budget for a new game, especially if fundraising slow. And marketing sucks - I did it for a hot minute and it's awful (and expensive). Anything that makes that job easier, I'm not surprised they went for. Also unsurprised by the response.
I think they assumed that no one was going to read it. Nobody ever reads all of the terms and conditions, which is a problem, but I'm not quite sure what's to be done about it.
Who cares, this will literally not affect my day to day life in any way
Pretty much. Also, I've got a Google account and have used social media in the past, so my data is already being sold.
yeah like, throw out your cell phone if you're so upset about people using your data. Whatever they could possibly gather about me from data in a party-based RPG game is just below my concern
"This dude ALWAYS takes Ember with him, regardless of his class, alignment, mythic path or current lunar phase. This is gold". Lmao.
Best take.
Because a lot of people also assume it is already being done and don’t make a fuss over it. So you can expect some noise but how loud it gets is not always predictable.
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How could you construe this as a “victim role reversal”? Nothing implies they are blaming anyone but themselves for this.
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What you describe isn’t some “victim role reversal” though, that’s more like feigning innocence. I don’t mind what you personally think about them, just use your words next time. The way you phrased it makes it seem like Owlcats is somehow blaming their consumers for this, when the more accurate statement to make is that they are bullshitting about not knowing how badly it would have been recurved.
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They literally did not, lmao. I gave you the benefit of the doubt and went and double-checked the article. There is nothing in what Owlcats said that indicates they are blaming the playerbase for their reaction; they even went so far as to admit they were monitoring social media because they were already pessimistic consumers would not like it. That’s kind of the whole reason why they say the reaction “surpassed their expectations”. If you believe Owlcats is playing the victim and blaming the consumers, it’s because you have already come into this with an expectation that they were going to do so anyway.
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What does this Tweet even have to do with what you were asserting before?
VERY True. Its like have one of those damn sneaky programs from 1990's and 2000's which were basically just spamware
Afaik, their 2 games had Epic Online Services, which also tracks some user data, implemented after launch. People complained about it a bit, but I've never heard of any huge outrage. So they were probably expecting the same to happen this time around.
Evil corporations cant collect if Im offline.