Owlcat Games has removed a controversial new player tracking tool from "Pathfinder": just one day after introducing "Wrath of the Righteous. "On Monday, July 24, Owlcat introduced update 2.1.5m to the game. In addition to the bug fixes and tweaks expected of its kind, the patch introduced AppsFlyer, which Owlcat describes as "an industry-standard tracking solution" that "allows developers and publishers to understand what portion of players, due to their ad campaigns, have purchased the game . and which parts of the game have been purchased due to the impact of the ad campaign."

Essentially an analytical tool, Owlcat explained in a Steam forum Q&A for "Wrath of the Righteous" that AppsFlyer works by "sucking up IP addresses, timestamps (time the game was launched), platforms, running game versions, and operating systems. He explains that it works by sucking up By using that data to create fingerprints and matching them with data provided by advertisers, Owlcat can get a rough idea of how many people have purchased a game after seeing an ad for that game online.

Players were less than thrilled; not only was AppsFlyer not present in their version of Wrath of the Righteous after its September 2021 release date, but their newfound thirst for data made an updated EULA necessary. Players who rejected the updated EULA could no longer play the game, effectively removing their access to the product (insofar as they owned anything in the digital library), which they could have owned for nearly two years at this point if they did not want AppsFlyer to take their data

I was not able to get the data.

I inquired because I was unclear why Owlcat waited so long after its release to introduce a tool like AppsFlyer. Unfortunately, I did not get much in the way of answers to my questions, but the company did offer the following comment: "First and foremost, we made a mistake and apologize to the community. Our rationale was to facilitate the success of Wrath of the Righteous by utilizing a user acquisition measurement tool to gauge the effectiveness of the new ad campaign. The implementation of this tracking solution was short-sighted, and after seeing the community response, we made the decision to remove it easily.

"Our players are the most important people to us and we don't want to do anything to lose their trust. This is an oversight and we will not be implementing a tracking solution in any future Wrath of the Righteous updates or future titles."

After the tool's introduction, the backlash was immediate: Wrath of the Righteous attracted nearly 200 negative reviews on Steam on July 24 and 25, lowering its "Recent Reviews" score to Mixed. In addition, a petition on the game's subreddit asking Owlcat to remove AppsFlyer has garnered 3.6K votes at the time of writing, with about 3.2K of those asking that the software be made opt-in or removed entirely.

This seems to have rather taken Owlcat by surprise: according to one of the studio's liaisons on Reddit, the backlash prompted "an emergency meeting immediately after the (community management) team raised the alarm," at which point "an on-site decision was made to remove everything The team was told that the decision was made." Some of us were quite pessimistic about this." The liaison officer said." But the scale (of the outrage) exceeded our worst expectations, and we had to respond quickly."

AppsFlyer was removed from the game with the 2.1.5n update on July 25, Owlcat said, removing "all data collected" from "those who had already accepted the new EULA" between the two patches. the EULA was similarly removed from the pre-AppsFlyer The EULA has been reverted to its version, but players will have to accept it again. For us, the community is much more important than a marketing campaign," Owlcat said.

Maybe I'm soft, or maybe I'm just too used to companies implementing such technology and not caring about fan reaction, but even if I wish they hadn't tried to implement AppsFlyer, I have to commend Owlcat for responding so quickly to the negative backlash It is not. According to the same Reddit liaison, it "took less than an hour" for the developers to begin preparing a removal patch once they became aware of the intense fan reaction. Furthermore, according to that liaison, "all plans to use this software have been discontinued and it will not appear in any form in any Rogue Trader or Pathfinder updates." If only it were this easy every time a game introduced a new way to track us on the Internet.