Owlcat Games managed to find itself in how water with its fans after introducing, and promptly removing, a new analytic tool in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. On July 25th the developers updated the nearly two year old game with the newest version of Unity, but among the was something that fans did not appreciate: AppFlyer. Owlcat describe it as, “an industry standard tracking solution” that “allows developers and publishers to understand which part of players have purchased the game due to the impact of their advertising campaigns”.

Owlcat provided a little more detail in a Q&A, explaining that AppFlyer works by taking some of your data and then using it form a “fingerprint” which it can then match up with other data provided by advertising companies and the like. The idea is by amassing all this, AppFlyer can help a developer determine if marketing was the driving force behind your purchase.

Now, taken by itself, this makes some sense. As a company I’m sure it would be fantastic to know if your marketing campaign, which are typically very expensive, actually achieved anything or if money was being tossed down the drain. And the data being collected isn’t too bad: IP address, timestamp of when the game as launched, platform, which version of the game and the operating system of the computer. Obviously Owlcat promised that the data would not be used for anything else, and AppFlyer say the same thing on their site.

So, before we delve into the rest of the story, its good to first imagine Owlcat’s perspective on things: AppFlyer could gather potentially useful data, although why they wanted to use it on an old(ish) game is beyond me.

However, people are understandably very touchy when it comes to their data being gathered up, especially when so many companies are flippant with it and will happily sell it to Steve the druggie behind Walmart for $5.

People were not happy with this new addition, and the backlash was immediate. The biggest issue is that the introduction of a new EULA that players had to agree to so that the required data could be sucked up and shot over to AppFlyer. If the new EULA was not agreed to, the game simply could not be played. In other words, gamers couldn’t play the game they bought in 2021 unless they agreed to new data collection terms not present when they first bought the game. They couldn’t even carry on playing the older version.

The result was 200 negative reviews being left on the Steam page, leading to the game’s rating dropping to “mixed.” Meanwhile, a petition was set up over on the game’s official subreddit calling for AppFlyer to either be removed or to at least make the data collection optional. It managed to attract 3.7k votes and got a direct response from Owlcat, who wrote: “Hey guys. Thank you all for the feedback, we hear you loud and clear, and apologize for all the outrage caused. Honestly, it was deserved. The change has been reverted. The third party app will be removed, all data already collected – wiped, and the old version of EULA reinstated with a hotfix within nearest 24h.”

Yes, that’s right, in just a day since it was introduced the AppFlyer system has been taken out. Kudos to Owlcat for such a speedy response.

On another Reddit thread, Owlcat replied to people theorising that Owlcat predicated the backlash based on how quickly they backtracked. Owlcat responded by saying that the response wasn’t prepared in advance: “It was an on-field decision to take everything down, by people with relevant authorities during an emergency meeting soon after the CM team has sounded the alarm. Some of us were quite pessimistic about this, so we were carefully monitoring the social media, but the scale of outburst surpassed the worst expectations, and it had to be reacted quickly upon.”

They also said that “It’s more of an idea that looked decent on paper (effectively, it could become a good tool to vastly reduce waste of budget on ineffective content, which is crucial for a 2-year old game) but turned out ugly due to underestimation of reaction and an insufficiently clear explanation.

“Toss here some side factors such as unusual patch size due to the Unity engine upgrade (“26 GB of spyware?!!!”) and a general distrust of hardcore PC gamers to these things that are traditionally more a part of mobile market, and this is what you get.”

Another Reddit user accused Owlcat of taking money from AppFlyer to implement the tech into the game. Owlcat was understandably upset, writing, “For the love of God no.”

“I already explained it earlier but I’ll repeat, the purpose was pretty open and simple – this app would allow us to compare the data on the amount of launches of the game with the data from our marketing campaigns (sales, banners etc.) to see where we spend budget effectively, and where we waste money.”

Owlcat also admitted that, “it was a controversial idea to begin with.”

So, lesson learned, it seems. The big takeaway, at least for me, is that Owlcat probably should have made the AppFlyer system a separate opt-in so that those willing to help support the developers further could, while those who wanted to protect their data could continue to enjoy the game.