Game launchers track user activity within the game. It’s how developers gather “user research” about how people play their game. It’s also telemetry about how your system is being used and is frankly invasive as possible without being illegal. And legality gets squidgy for data so nothing is off limits.
2K wanted that user data to sell to keep generating revenue from Civilization after the game and DLC were purchased. Typically a company has little incentive to linger on a game, they will publish, babysit the game for a few years with bug fixes, and quietly start developing the next project. 2K was farming data but for some reason didn’t like what they got so they stopped. I’m not sure if this is caused by consumer backlash but the end result is a benefit for us game players.
CPU heavy games like Civ run like ass on the Flatpak version of Steam by the way. It’s a known bug that I think they’re trying to fix but it’s still there last I checked.
Game launchers track user activity within the game.
lol wut? I don’t need to install a game launcher to track your activity in game.
If you leave a launcher running in the background at all times then you’re sending at the very least your current IP whenever the client does a poll.
I also don’t need to install a game launcher to do that, either. It’s just a lot easier to avoid having my process killed if that prevents the user from having “social features” like a friends list and chat, the standard shit.
I stopped playing the game when that whole launcher with un-skipable animations started popping up. Honestly, any game that does this too finds it’s way into the returns.
Using it in 2004 was like a dream. It was already incredible to have all my valve games in one place that I can redownload whenever (overnight slowly on DSL) without having any discs and it just worked. Didn’t have to insert a disc just to play the installed game via activation, didn’t have to clone the disc and mount the iso to pretend the same. It just worked and has just worked ever since.
And looking for some good low latency servers to play (CS at the time for me) before even opening the game…only to have to choose 150-200 ping ones with the fun mods I wanted to play and be booted from them from for having high ping 🤣
I was also using it then and most people hated it at the time. People generally saw it as useless DRM they had to install to play the games they had already paid for. The biggest complaint was needing to install it and register Counter-Strike to get the 1.6 update.
Absolutely it was. It’s definitely had its growing pains, but I was in a generally advantageous place where most of the issues hadn’t caused problems for me. In this case, I was sorta golden path user.
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