bought this game on steam cos they have a bundle discount there. and then i got reminded of the RedShell thing. got my tech dude to run a check on this game and I can safely say there aren't any tracking SDK in this game - so if you're worried about that, don't be :)

I work in marketing so I deal with analytics tracking all the time (mostly mobile, but dealt with RS one time). "Full access rights" might be an oversimplistic way of putting it. They are only able to send out mostly non-identifiable information to help marketing see which campaign works best (general location down to city only, operating system, etc).

I personally don't mind giving them this info as I know how valuable these data are for marketing, especially for small-to-medium studios. Marketing can be really, really expensive and it will feel like throwing money to a black hole without any feedback. It helps them spend the money wisely and grow the company.

For the Holy Potatoes dev, while I do think they should've explicitly asked the permission of players before tracking their data, they also removed the RedShell patch in one day after hearing several complaints. That was extremely speedy of a response and I commend the developer for that. Not every company will admit or even care at all about this stuff.

If you want to put them in your blacklist, fine, that is your decision. I just think people should know the other side of the coin.

PS: if you're bothered by tracking you might want to delete any Facebook / Google app on your phones too, they track SO MUCH MORE.

Gets to pay ? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) who says we're not paying already ..... and maybe paying dearly ⊂◉‿◉つ
yes, some people will have fun .... but it won't be us, the common people.

Anyway just check some news, there should be some international papers telling something about our current situation....

If you have english browser or set to search in english search for: netherlands bec ( bec as in becoming)
do the same for belgium bec
iceland bec
germany bec
etc etc etc

i havent tried every name but Netherlands get the word s narco state behind it in the results, maybe its because dozens of Dutch papers and topics talk about it or name it like that , maybe, but its funny to see.

Anyway we don't have to watch funny tv shows or watch comedians on youtube or on our tv network, just watch our govt debating is a show on its own... hilarious, and cannot be taken seriously, myabe a few tiny parties are right the leading ones are always wrong : best 'sketch' ever was the dividend , they decided to stay in UK , (◑‿◐)

Thanks for the reply and explanation.

I am not bothered at all by tracking cause i dont have social media, and forums? ah well forums, i've had dozens of accounts in the past 20 years and i am still replying so forums is not that bad to visit, and online shops, well you order something and they deliver it , if they should start getting weird behaviour , then we call the police :D

Anyway online stores and shops you buy things are not that bad, its the games that collect data or even worse Win 10 that has a part working in the cloud, it seems 98% can be blocked except for that small cloud part....
companies like mickeysoft are the ones collecting tons of user data.....



When exactly did we go from "my computer, my decision" to acceptance of "your marketing data is valuable therefore we demand its surrender."

Is that information valuable to a developer? Fine, make me an offer. That's what Free* to Play games often do - they offer a product that is supported by data-mining (and microtransactions on the side often enough). Fair enough - I keep away from such titles, but if others who don't care about it enjoy them... well, the only loss is the acceptance of such practices, I guess.

However, a paid product double-dipping should be unacceptable. But I guess I'm just too damn old to expect the same set of values from more recent gamers.

Why do you assume I use either to start with?

Hell, I still use an old flip cell phone with cruddy ole OS on it not even supporting web browsing. I only need it to make calls. Don't plan on paying for any bells and whistles, don't need them. I'd still love to be able to use my old reliable brick Nokia, for that matter. At least it had keys large enough for me not to have to strain to hit with my big clumsy fingers.

It's fine, we can agree to disagree on that. Free speech am I right? Haha.

However, this is the kind of thing I wish people will not spread around. It is still your computer. You have the decision of whether to use any app or not. A quick browser search will show that tracking data is the general practice currently. While I do believe the developers should explicitly say "oh hey, I'm tracking your data" I am in the opinion that general public should be aware that tracking is probably expected at this time. Not just apps, but browsers too.

Don't like the tracking practice? Simple, don't use the product. I hate to see some minority (not pointing finger at you) go around campaigning that all tracking developers are "evil" and "wants to steal your identity" because the truth is, they just want to improve their product. Negative reviews and bad publicity hurts more than what people think, and I am not sure that these developers deserve that.

We could all do with more positive reviews and less negativity in our life, right? :)

Hi!
I'm interested in this game but previous Holy Potatoes games here haven't been receiving any updates for a while... Can you check with the devs to bring us the latest updates for these games ( 1.1.2 for weapon shop and 1.1.3 for space if I'm correct) Thanks a lot!

Sorry about late reply - wasn't around.

One of us is contributing toward general acceptance of such practice, though. That hardly leaves me content.

Just like I could "check" that RedShell was collecting all that juicy tracking information when nobody bothered to inform gamers that it was suddenly added to legitimately purchased products?

Hey, call me silly, but I'd rather just play and enjoy a game, not spend ages trying to find out what manner of dickhattery its developers decided to engage in.

The acceptance of ubiquitous tracking is a tremendous danger to the society as a whole. I'm not going to go into wall-of-text explanation as to why (especially since it's a really complex issue), but privacy was declared a cornerstone of democracies since the French philosophers began to shape the idea in modern terms.

The fact that we are giving tools of market and population control to entities driven solely by profit maximization completely aside.

Anecdote time - when Steam came around, I was extremely unhappy about the fact that, ultimately, any game I buy through it would be tied to online authentication and subject to expiration whenever that disappears.

I pretty much ended buying no games for 3 years, until it became clear you either accepted Steam as a necessary evil or found a new hobby. Literally no large title released in that time frame ran without Steam - I even bought one boxed game in a store that, without any indication of it on the packaging, only contained Steam installer and Steam game code inside it.

So excuse me if I'm going to continue to voice my objection against something that I see as incredibly damaging to the society in general. I read enough sci-fi dystopian novels (not to mention talked with people who, as an example, did early development work at Google) to know where it's headed. Human nature being what it is, and legal protection of privacy in that respect being next to inexistant. At least outside EU, and even GDPR got ignored by majority of tech companies in general, and game developers in particular. Hell, RedShell got found in games in active use by EU residents weeks after GDPR deadline, and to the best of my knowledge nobody got fined.

Funny how decades of developers managed to make great games without violating privacy of somebody's computer, much less resorting to installing third-party spyware on them.

You want game analytics data? Ask for it. Accept that some won't consent to it, and move on - you'll get enough people willing to share. For that matter, at least add some legal protection to your ToS for the information you collect to the point where any transfer of it to a third party is strictly illegal. Sure, you can still sell it behind everybody's back, but at least there's a pretense of attention to customer protection.

Hell, I sent enough bug reports and hardware specs to people I tested things for free just because I liked what they were doing. The difference here was that this was MY decision to do so. Also, Google et al had yet to make their billions trading such information, so nobody really saw it as something marketable, unlike the situation nowadays.

This does not happen. Instead, I get an ultimatum - pay for my game, which I may or may not turn into a data-mining tool because "this EULA is subject to future modifications," and fuck your privacy, plebe.

The more you accept that, the fewer games will be there for me to enjoy, until I run into exactly the same situation as happened with Steam distribution being the only way to obtain titles that interested me. Considering gaming has been my main hobby for *cough* decades, as well as a professional focus of mine, I'm not keen on looking for a substitute.

Especially since any benefits gained from such enforcement of ubiquitous data collection are hardly outweighing the damage it does.

I think anybody abusing my trust this way absolutely does. RedShell was literal spyware - third-party software used to pull information from people's computers without consent or knowledge.

I'm happy to see any developer who thought that was a right thing to do in the first place to crash and burn, because if they could not bother to consider the implication of that serious of an invasion of privacy, they do not deserve to exist. Leave market room for those that do.

It's negativity that changes things for the benefit of everybody. Or at least has the potential to do so, if not misused itself.

Blind acceptance of the status quo never moved the society forward.

Edit: Fixed some misquote derp.