Counterpoint: What does it matter? If I don't own the game, I cannot use the code to access a beta version anyway. I might be missing a technical aspect, but my understanding is that you are only concerned with consent to telemetry collection. Once I agree to your policy, couldn't you just show me the list of all codes without any downside for PDX?
Thank you for the clarification. Your previous post sounded like you could see all Steam games as well (how else would you have known that "all [their] Steam games" were successfully linked).
Counterpoint 1: "But X does something even worse than Y" does not mean we shouldn't care what Y does. This happens to be a forum about Y, so of course we're talking about what Y does. Just for argument's sake: Yes, there are many many companies out there that collect much more intrusive data. So what?
Counterpint 2: You have fundamentally misunderstood the GDPR framework. For the GDPR to even apply, according to Art 2(1) PDX has to process "personal data". Under Art 4(1) this means "any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person". So if PDX were to wholly deal in aggregate statistics and leave out any personal identifiers, they would only be handling anonymized data, which wouldn't even fall under the scope of GDPR and hence require no consent. In making this huge deal about GDPR complicance, PDX is tacitly admitting that they don't do that. Sure, the end goal may or may not be a broad statistical overview, but either they are unable or unwilling to do it in a truly anonymized way.
Counterpoint 3: Only thinking about the end goal of data collection in an ideal world is a bit short-sighted. Data gets lost (on an old harddrive), stolen, mishandled (sold by a disgruntled employee), company ownership and policies may change, etc. Part of the GDPR's focus is making companies really think about what kinds of data they collect, whether this data is really necessary and in what way it is collected and stored to mitigate long-term risks. In this light I don't find your argument very compelling.
I completely agree with all your points and I still have some hopes that the current version will allow an opt-out in line with the "freely given" consent requirement. But I do have to cut PDX at least some slack for their historical versions. Patching an opt-out into every single version would be a huge undertaking (and likely change the checksum, which would make saves incompatible, ruining the whole point). At least for access to historical versions I kind of understand the move to say "agree to the collection or you can't play", although as I have pointed out earlier, there are likely to be somewhat easy technical solutions to stop the collection server-side, that PDX should have looked into. Thankfully you as the user can always take technical steps to block EU4 from phoning home, so simply agreeing to their policy is not equal to letting PDX have their way.
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