Fan outcry pushes Pathfinder dev to delete new data-sucking tool and all its info one day after introducing it: 'The scale of the outburst surpassed worst expectations'

pcgamer.com:

Owlcat Games has yanked a controversial new player-tracking tool from Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous just a day after introducing it. On Monday, July 24, Owlcat introduced update 2.1.5m, a hefty patch to the game that—amidst all the bugfixes and tweaks you'd expect from this kind of thing—introduced AppsFlyer, described by Owlcat 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».

An analytics tool, basically. Owlcat explained in a Q&A on the Steam forums for Wrath of the Righteous that AppsFlyer works by sucking up your IP address, timestamp (when you launched the game), platform, the version of the game you're running, and your OS. It uses that data to create a fingerprint that it then matches against data provided by advertisers, giving Owlcat a rough idea of how many people bought the game after seeing an ad for it online.

Players were less than thrilled. Not only had AppsFlyer not been present in their versions of Wrath of the Righteous since that game's September 2021 release date, its new hunger for data necessitated an update to the EULA. Players who refused to accept the updated EULA were unable to play the game, effectively removing their access to a product they could have feasibly owned (inasmuch as we own anything in our digital libraries) for nearly two years at this point if they didn't want AppsFlyer grabbing their data. 

I'm unclear as to why AppsFlyer was introduced to Pathfinder so long after release. I've reached out to Owlcat to ask it about that, and I'll update this piece if I hear back.

The outcry was immediate: Wrath of the Righteous gathered almost 200