Shall we discuss the presence of RedShell being used?

[Nalkor]

Okay, after all the stuff about tracking information and privacy policies being updated, I went and looked at this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/8pud8b/psa_red_shell_spyware_holy_potatoes_were_in_space/ while reading about a RedShell post on Secret World Legend's subreddit. Of course I found RedShell.dll in that game's steam install folder, Funcom is kind dumb like that, but when I did a quick search for RedShell.dll on my D: Drive, I was a little shocked to see the RedShellSDK.DLL file in this game's VaporumGame_Data > Managed folder.

So can someone on the developer team please explain to me just why you have decided to put some tracking software in your offline single-player game to gather data on your players? I'm fairly certain that while as an NA-based player, I don't get much say about the issue, but how would an EU-based player protected by the GDPR handle this? As long as this piece of tracking software is part of the game, I'm keeping it uninstalled, if it is removed, it's going to get installed right back ASAP.

I really don't like making these kinds of posts, they can come off as whiny and even a little ♥♥♥♥♥♥ truth be told, but I really don't want a company tracking what my PC does when the game is running, or at all, it's why I've disabled Flash and Java for my browsers to prevent ads and such from hitting me at the worst times, so RedShell in a game I own is an immediate deal-breaker. I won't be requesting a refund or anything, I'm not that much of a whiny fear-mongerer, I just would like a quick answer and confirmation that eventually the program will be removed.

[JaseMourne]

Hey, Nalkor!

First of all, I would like to apologize and assure you that Redshell was disabled before GDPR came to effect. The presence of the DLL file in the game directory is simply a mistake on our part that we are working to correct. We will remove it in the coming patch.

We formerly used RedShell ONLY to track the effectiveness of a single campaign on Reddit and Facebook to see where the greatest concentration of our audience and fans was, so we could focus our community activities in a meaningful way. We are a very small team with a very small budget and we don't have enough resources for some large scale advertising campaigns, so this was just an experiment on our part.

Since then, we haven’t run a single campaign and the plug-in is actually disabled in code, in accordance with GDPR. We simply never initialize it when the game is starting up, so yes, the DLL is currently there, but it hasn't been doing a thing.

Even in games where RedShell is still enabled, its only task is to match an ad link click and the actual purchase on Steam, GOG, or wherever. So, for instance, when you see an ad on Facebook and you click it, a generated string is sent to RedShell servers. The link most likely points you to a store page, and when you actually buy the game and run it for the first time, the game tells the plug-in to see if the same generated string was ever put onto their servers. If yes, the devs have a match and they know that, "Okay, cool, so this ad works!" or if there are very few matches, it doesn't, and so they know they need to improve the ad. RedShell, to my knowledge, doesn't collect any other data other than that. At least there's no way we could send any other data to them.

Thank you for bringing this to our attention!

[Nalkor]

Originally posted by JaseMourne:

Hey, Nalkor!

First of all, I would like to apologize and assure you that Redshell was disabled before GDPR came to effect. The presence of the DLL file in the game directory is simply a mistake on our part that we are working to correct. We will remove it in the coming patch.

We formerly used RedShell ONLY to track the effectiveness of a single campaign on Reddit and Facebook to see where the greatest concentration of our audience and fans was, so we could focus our community activities in a meaningful way. We are a very small team with a very small budget and we don't have enough resources for some large scale advertising campaigns, so this was just an experiment on our part.

Since then, we haven’t run a single campaign and the plug-in is actually disabled in code, in accordance with GDPR. We simply never initialize it when the game is starting up, so yes, the DLL is currently there, but it hasn't been doing a thing.

Even in games where RedShell is still enabled, its only task is to match an ad link click and the actual purchase on Steam, GOG, or wherever. So, for instance, when you see an ad on Facebook and you click it, a generated string is sent to RedShell servers. The link most likely points you to a store page, and when you actually buy the game and run it for the first time, the game tells the plug-in to see if the same generated string was ever put onto their servers. If yes, the devs have a match and they know that, "Okay, cool, so this ad works!" or if there are very few matches, it doesn't, and so they know they need to improve the ad. RedShell, to my knowledge, doesn't collect any other data other than that. At least there's no way we could send any other data to them.

Thank you for bringing this to our attention!

Thank you for the reply, I'll be re-installing the game since the RedShellSDK.DLL is currently disabled and not doing anything.

On a side-note, I couldn't help but remember that for the rig choices in the beginning, there are still 2 empty tubes/chambers/containers, I hope we'll be seeing an extra Rig choice or two in an upcoming patch. The campaign's ads wouldn't have affected me since I use uBlock Origin on my browsers, too many times I've had to deal with sites using ads for revenue where the ads weren't being checked and malicious ads managed to sneak in and try and plant Malware on my computer.

[JaseMourne]

We're very glad to hear that! :) The DLL is going to be removed in the coming patch in any case.

I'll be 100% honest with you. We don't plan to add another rig, although I'm sure that'd be cool. We have a few more updates in store for you guys, but a new rig isn't one of them.

[Nalkor]

Originally posted by JaseMourne:

We're very glad to hear that! :) The DLL is going to be removed in the coming patch in any case.

I'll be 100% honest with you. We don't plan to add another rig, although I'm sure that'd be cool. We have a few more updates in store for you guys, but a new rig isn't one of them.

That's understandable, it's not like a new playstyle could easily be done with a new rig given that the four covered currently in-game cover pretty much every play-style archetype possible in this genre.

[JaseMourne]

Exactly!

[Nalkor]

Originally posted by JaseMourne:

Exactly!

The only kind of playstyle I could see where it would be a rig that hands out buffs and debuffs to certain types of weapons and powers after either a certain number of floors or after combat ends, but that would be too RNG dependent.

[Jack]

Just to chime in, the dll is gone as they said in case anyone checks on this

[Revisor]

Cool reaction. It shouldn't have been there in the first place, but the explanation and the quick removal are reassuring.

[Osselpi]

Thanks Jase & Vaporum-team, great reaction towards concerned players. Kudos to you! I wish more devs/publishers would've handled the issue like you did.

[Sarimae]

don't software companies test what third party software does ? If it would be "only" to collect CPU/GPU frametimes or anything in beta or EA, ok...if you asked for it. But Software collecting 1000 different thing besides that, which have nothing to do with the game or anything, nah...that is ugly :(

Why was this spyware-product that excessfull in the first place at all ?

I mean, how do they get softwatre companies to use it anyway ? "oh, you are making a game, please be so kind, and use our software to spy the users on different things" ?

Or will there be legal actions because of fraud from the devs side ?

And no, i do not care if removed before or after the GDPR came to law. In Germany it has been illegal to collect data without opt-in before.

Please, next time ASK and do not simply suggest...thank in advance

[luckz]

Originally posted by Sarimae:

Why was this spyware-product that excessfull in the first place at all ?

Because game developers / publishers pay services like Red Shell, https://buffpanel.com/ , https://gameanalytics.com/ to get information about their players and their behaviour. Companies are happy to pay many thousands depending on what information they're looking for. Valve will not tell them much, so their options are such 'secret espionage' like in any mobile game, or using aggregated services like SteamSpy which pretty much died with Valve's GDPR changes.

[Combat Wombat]

Originally posted by luckz:

Originally posted by Sarimae:

Why was this spyware-product that excessfull in the first place at all ?

Because game developers / publishers pay services like Red Shell, https://buffpanel.com/ , https://gameanalytics.com/ to get information about their players and their behaviour. Companies are happy to pay many thousands depending on what information they're looking for. Valve will not tell them much, so their options are such 'secret espionage' like in any mobile game, or using aggregated services like SteamSpy which pretty much died with Valve's GDPR changes.

Online achivements? Would those get the information required?