Data Harvesting From a Developer's Perspective

cliffski raises some questions about the need for game developers to have some amount of data from the users who play their games. He says, "PC Games connecting to a central server to send information (outside of MMOs) have gotten a (deserved) bad reputation in recent years. The huge outcry about Mass Effect and Spore are evidence enough of that. But in gamers' hurry to prevent intrusive DRM systems and dubious privacy-breaking data harvesting, are we throwing out the good with the bad?" Clearly, some aspects of games could be improved by having a better knowledge of average PC specs or knowing which parts of the games are more entertaining to the users. Input from customers helps to improve almost any product, as indicated by the usage of countless surveys and focus groups. But where do we draw the line between being inquisitive and being intrusive? What can game developers do to prove that the collection techniques or the data themselves wouldn't be abused?

Comments

One small step

[frovingslosh]

Years ago I wrote an adventure type game for the 8 bit North Star Horizon. Very few copies were ever distributed. I was rather surprised years later when I move to another state, logged into a public BBS (this was pre-Internet) and found that the game was running as an option on that BBS. I contacted the sysop and introduced myself. And I ended up making a lot of changes to the code, streamlining it and expanding the game. In the process, one of the things that I did was to simply log all of the things that players typed in that the parser rejected. That allowed me to adjust the game for a few things that I had not expected users to try, and even spot a few repeated spelling errors, so that the game could give out spelling advice.

Echoing through the cave, you hear a voice in the distance call out "I before E except after C".