They're selling the average consumer's data, which can be used by the computer industry to output stuff that's more relevant than it might otherwise be.
There is a huge different between metrics/average user data like hardware stats, bought games, connection bandwidth, latency, and personal data.
It's not as though they're selling our identities, our personal information, our credit card details, or anything else.
Well, they are selling your personal identity and thus your personal information. You credit card details are forwarded to companies who check if you might be able to actually pay, if you are in dept(i am not, for that matter), what you buy from where, luxury goods, etc. Eg. people switching from their current brand of beverage to a cheaper one are indeed analyzer and let some alarm bells ring somewhere, because you are likely to have financial difficulties ahead.
Why are people so defensive about their personal information?
Well, do you have nothing to hide? OK, so tell me, do you have HIV? Are you engaged? Divorced? How old are you? Are you colored, asian, white? Have you been unemployed over the past years? Have you ever been late with paying dept or invoices? If yes, with what company? What did you buy there and why?
Let me guess, you don't like that information to be available to a third party. But you do seem to have no problem giving just that information to some company which will do whatever they like with that information. See the issue? Think about what you are doing online. People have lost their jobs because of less. People in central Europe have actually been shot or imprisoned about 25 years back... People in china and many other nations TODAY are imprisoned because of governments using THESE companies for information collection. People are actually sitting in jail in some backwater country, because of what they published via services like steam. People are actually being accused of crimes by the US, because of what they wrote on twitter.
And no, this is no paranoia, it's reality... sadly.
I think we're considering this from an overly-consumer perspective,
Well, we are customers, ... If you buy a car, what do you think about while trying to lower the price?
- You think about how the owner of the company the sales guy is employed by earns less money on that car.
- You think about how the you can spend that extra money. Perhaps you will buy that new navigation system or invite your finance/wife/girlfriend to an awesome evening at the cinema?
Cmon, be serious
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and it seems anti-Steamers have a beef with high quality market information.
Oh, I'm just interested in the topic and am pretty sure most numbers I know are very crude, but do outline some basic issues.
If you're still adamant on not using Steam, why are you even bringing the discussion to this forum?
Because we are interested in being able to play games in the future! If nobody says anything, what is going to happen? Then we will in the future see just steam-only games from paradox. I like many of the games published by paradox, but it would be very sad if i was forced to no longer buy those games.
This is a Steamworks-based game, and I'd imagine it'd take a bit of work to recreate the mechanics if the Steam part of the source was removed;
I've got no problem in paying 30+€ instead of 20, or waiting a few months more
. Quality takes time.