'analytics' and 'surveillance' are not the same thing

trying to understand player behavior in the context of a board or video game (though there is some overlap!) is not the same as trying to understand user behavior in the context of social media or purchasing behavior - the data of both of which derive their value from being sold to THIRD PARTIES as a commodity.

being able to tune a fun little video game is not the same thing at all

Does your opinion change if they use it to train a commercial program to do a similar task?

For me at least, no. Making money by training a model from user data on such a game seems like a perfectly fine thing to do.

Collecting analytics like this is effectively the same as play-testing physical board games in-development. People play a game, information is gathered, and the game is tuned in response to that. If zero information were ever gathered, games could not be balanced or tuned for other things like unforeseen problems.

Please, show me a piece of software, or game, that is perfect the first time it is made.

It's effectively the same, except people volunteer or are paid to play test.

This whole industry really needs a lesson on consent.

So long as personal information is not collected, consent is not morally necessary.

If I collect information on how often a coin-op Street Fighter II game is played in an arcade, while collecting no personal information, consent is not needed.

Because using someone else's hardware in a public space is clearly equivalent to using your own hardware in the privacy of your own home.

You are not entitled to play the game, which is hosted on their server which requires bandwidth and other resources. In the same way that you are free to make demands about how software runs on your machine, the author is free to make demands about the use of their software.

This is software coming from a server, not hardware. It doesn't matter which device it's run on, or whether it's in your home or not.

If the data gathered is only on gameplay, and not something that can be used as PII like IP addresses or device information, then it should be fine. Gathering things like the score and time spent completing the level, isn't a problem. This could be used to rank the levels, without gathering any user information.

If gathering the data should be fine, then asking for permission should also be fine.

Indie games don’t have a budget for playtesting, but they can probably swing a GA account.

There are games that let you opt-out, hell even ones that ask you when you first open the game. There are bad apples, but there are plenty of good ones too.

I think the argument is that they shouldn't be opt-out, but opt-in.

If I want to play a game and provide my feedback, the default should be that that doesn't happen unless I explicitly say it should.

Opt-out means that, by default, you're collecting metrics from my plays, until I find the means to opt-out.

If the game asks you when you first open it, does it matter if the question is to "opt out" or "opt in"?

If it asks you then it's neither opt-in nor opt-out. Then it depends on how it asks you. If it's a simple yes/no, it's fine. If it's typical tech bullshit where your options are a big "I want to make the world a better place and save the whales by sending my data" or a tiny button in the corner labeled "maybe later" that takes you to another screen saying "please confirm you want to opt out of data collection and kill a bunch of kittens" then not so good.

if the analytics lead to an actual game on steam im down

You could just package an arbitrary 100 levels, let the player play them in any order, then give rewards for 10, 20, 30, 40, etc. levels completed/mastered.

This would still benefit from a difficulty rating system or order

Or go full on kaizo Mario and make it a random room out of the 100

naw im looking to have fun, not cry

something in me loves progressively harder levels