bit-tech.net - Game Phone Home

Cliff Harris over at bit-tech.net has an op-ed up entitlted Game Phone Home! on why having your games dial home over the internet may actually be a good thing:

We need to learn that sharing usage data is good. Right now, a singleplayer game that connects to a developers website is automatically considered evil, regardless of intent or reality. This isn't without good reason. Intrusive DRM systems and suspicious data harvesting without asking permission have made gamers rightfully defensive of what programs get allowed through their firewalls.

This reaction is understandable, but it's also holding back game design.

Lets look at why a game developer wants his games to phone home, and why you shouldn't mind – or even be keen to enable it!

The first reasons are technical. Gathering data from your customers is the only real way to know what machines are running your games. On the PC, no two boxes are the same. And no two games have identical demographics. It's good to know so many people have bought widescreen monitors but how many of them play Democracy?

I need to know what screen resolution my customers machines run at if I'm to make sensible decisions on default (and supported) resolutions. Knowing how much RAM and CPU horsepower those machines have is another great piece of data that lets me as a coder tune the game for the perfect balance of performance against shininess. Note; nobody cares what the average new PC has inside it, or the Steam Hardware survey - what I and fellow devs care about is what my customers PC's are like.

Knowing the hardware is great, but knowing the software helps too. Should I use Windows XP and Vista-only code? The only way to know is to see how many people played the last game on windows 9x machines.

Knowing what revision of video card drivers people have would be good too, especially if you manage to auto-capture performance data at the same time. Imagine checking the support page on a site and seeing that 'driver revision X for this card improves the FPS by an average of 34 percent'.

Technical stats are great news for the coders, but designers also have reasons for auto collecting data. How many people got to level six? How many attempts did the average gamer need to complete that mission? How many found the hidden passage? How many people completed the game?

This data is all gold dust to designers. Without it, we basically throw a huge pile of features and content into the game and cross our fingers. We have no idea what bits people are spending time on, or where they get stuck, so no idea what to put in patches or expansions. Listening to the 1 percent of gamers on forums is great, but hardly truly representative of the majority.