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What do we make of developers collecting anonymous player data?
pi r squared
Posts: 4,272 Forum Member
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I wasn't aware of this until quite recently but seemingly there is a trend nowadays for games to "phone home" with various anonymous stats about how the game is being played. For instance, Mass Effect 2 sent back enough information for the developers to identify that the average completion time is 33 hours, that two PC players have played through the entire game 28 times, and that 80% of all players use a male Shepard, amongst pther stats. Nothing ground-breaking in those but I'm sure there is plenty of harvested information that Bioware will be using to inform the planning and design of Mass Effect 3, due Q4 2011.
So what are our general feelings on this? Personally, I don't mind it happening so long as the data remains anonymous. It makes no odds to me whether Bioware know I use a female Shepard and favour the heavy pistol over the machine gun. In fact, if this data helps them create a better ME3 then I'm all for it. But will it stop there, or will developers become more greedy/hungry for information? Will there come a point where locational information (eg. IP address/geolocation) starts getting sent back too? Or even a detailed profile of you, harvested through social network or other means? Or is that just good old-fashioned cyber-paranoia?
So what are our general feelings on this? Personally, I don't mind it happening so long as the data remains anonymous. It makes no odds to me whether Bioware know I use a female Shepard and favour the heavy pistol over the machine gun. In fact, if this data helps them create a better ME3 then I'm all for it. But will it stop there, or will developers become more greedy/hungry for information? Will there come a point where locational information (eg. IP address/geolocation) starts getting sent back too? Or even a detailed profile of you, harvested through social network or other means? Or is that just good old-fashioned cyber-paranoia?
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As long as they use this type of data to build future games around what it looks like people want then I am happy for them to do it.
If developers want information, they should ask using surveys or offer an opt-in in the game installer not backdoor methods.
Personally, I block all games I install from communicating outside of my LAN unless they are online multiplayer games like Warcraft - if they won't work without an internet connection, they get binned.
Well, I don't know about other games, but Mass Effect 2 (the game mentioned in the OP) only collects/sends anon. data if you give it permission. You can turn it off...
But Jennifer Hale's voice acting is superior.
I don't mind them collecting anon data like this one (as long as the choice is made clear wither to send this data or not), any other data would be crossing the line.
I know! FemShep all the way!
I hate Mark Meer's Shepard.
His voice is OK, it was better in the first game, in the second it seems a lot more...monotonous.
Although I have to wonder how the data collection came to that 80% conclusion, because most people surely play through several Shepards (I myself have 3 femsheps and 2 male shepards, with varying choices/attitudes etc.)
So...I'm skeptical about that 80% having ONLY played male.
Road and traffic planners often use a number of tools to measure numbers of cars using a certain road, speed of cars along a road, and so on. You or I could be in one of those cars, and we'd be providing an anonymous statistic to be used to improve (or otherwise) that road or surrounding infrastructure. It's not opt-in but most wouldn't decry it as "snooping". Every time you or I buy a can of Coke, we become an anonymous piece of data to the Coca Cola company, and of course that gets used to inform marketing strategies, PR and so on. There is a fine line and at the moment, I think the developers are on the right side of it, but as privacies continue to get eroded, I think it'll be interesting to watch the actions of these developers.
But would you actually chuck away a £30+ game if you happen to have bought it and then realised it didn't work without an internet connection?
I'm sure a few do, but to say "most" is probably an overstatement. The stats show that near 50% of gamers didn't even bother to complete the game - I can't imagine any of those would have created multiple Shepards and then not bothered to see the game out. Or maybe the gamers who play female Shepard are the same gamers who opt out of the data harvest
Some individual games may have similar agreements which people will agree to upon first activation of the game. Quite common on the PC during the installation phase with the wall of text that no one ever reads but scrolls down to highlight the OK or Yes button.
I remember Epic saying last year that less than 50% of 360 owners who played Gears 1&2 were playing in HD. In November, MS released information about how XBL Gold members spent their online time. 40% of the time was spent gaming, with non gaming activities making up the rest. Sony do the same thing with the PSN as do MS with (their crappy) GFWL and Valve with Steam and we have all agreed at least once for this data to be monitored, collected and reported.