16 Studios Removing Alleged Spyware From PC Games After Fan Outcry
https://tinyurl.com/ydxpxddj
In Mario Kart, red shells target your nearest rival and ruthlessly stop them
in their tracks. Marketing company Red Shell, meanwhile, helps video game
companies more accurately target you. This fact has not sat well with some
players who have recently discovered the software in a veritable kartload of
Steam games.
According to Red Shell’s website, their software is meant to help game
companies “measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns” by “
tying information from marketing campaigns to in-game play.” Basically, it’
s installed alongside games and tracks information about your devices
(operating system, browser version number, IP address, etc) in order to
ascertain how effective advertisements for that particular game are. The
company swears up and down that it doesn’t collect personal information.
“We don’t collect names, emails, or addresses,” Red Shell says on its
website, noting that games can offer an opt-out to players if developers so
choose. “Our service basically says ‘this computer clicked on a link from
this YouTube video and the same computer played your game.’ We have no
interest in tracking people, just computers for the purposes of attribution.”
The software has been discovered in over 50 games including The Elder Scrolls
Online, Conan Exiles, Hunt: Showdown, and Civilization VI. For the past
couple weeks, a contingent of players have dedicated themselves to weeding it
out, decrying it as “spyware” that many companies failed to disclose.
“Red Shell is a spyware that tracks data of your PC and shares it with 3rd
parties,” Redditor Alexspeed75 wrote last week in a thread that’s became
something of a rallying place for aggrieved players. “On their website they
formulate it all in very harmless language, but the fact is that this is
software from someone I don’t trust and whom I never invited, which is
looking at my data and running on my PC against my will. This should have no
place in a full price PC game, and in no games if it were up to me.”
Since then, players of the aforementioned games and many more have started
irate threads in Steam forums and subreddits. In many cases, they’ve gotten
developers to pledge to remove Red Shell.
“We integrated Red Shell with the goal to track the efficiency of our
marketing campaigns (how many players clicked on our advertisements on social
media platforms and then purchased the game afterwards). There was never any
intention to sell data to third parties,” said the developers of multiplayer
horror game Dead By Daylight, expressing a sentiment similar to many other
developers who’ve removed Red Shell from their games. “That being said, we
have seen the player frustrations expressed about the use of this technology.
Our passionate and dedicated fans are the reason why Dead by Daylight is a
success, especially the ones who have been with us from the beginning. We
have removed Red Shell from Dead by Daylight in the 2.0.0 update.”
As of now, 16 games have either removed Red Shell or have pledged to do so in
the near future, including The Elder Scrolls Online, Conan Exiles, Hunt:
Showdown, Battlerite, Secret World Legends, Total War, and Warhammer:
Vermintide.
You’re reading Steamed, Kotaku’s page dedicated to all things in and around
Valve’s PC gaming service.
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简单来说，有间营销公司 Red Shell 开发的软件功能是：借由资讯化营销活动对玩游戏
的影响来帮助游戏公司量化其营销活动的有效性。
因此，他会包装在游戏程式内一起装进玩家电脑中，用以追踪玩家的电子设备资讯，像是
操作系统、浏览器版本、IP......等，而该公司也宣誓绝不会收集玩家个人资讯。
当然玩家才不相信.....
国外玩家在reddit上的主要讨论串 https://www.reddit.com/user/Alexspeed75
而事实上己经有超过50套游戏被发现装有此软件，包含上古卷轴 online、流亡者科南、
恶灵猎杀：紧要关头、文明帝国6......。
在玩家的愤怒之下，己经有16个游戏工作室承诺己经或不久之后移除这个软件。包含了
上古卷轴 online、流亡者科南、恶灵猎杀：紧要关头、战争仪式、神秘世界传奇、全军
破敌、战锤：末世鼠疫......等。