Steam – Phoning home

Valve has gone all Big Brother on us by using their Steam content delivery platform to monitor everyone playing Half-Life 2 – Episode 1. You can check out some of the data that’s been collected so far here.
Just think, you didn’t even know it was happening until now! Scary.
On the stats page Valve have commented that:

We’re sharing the data we collect because we think people will find it interesting, and because we expect to spot emergent problems earlier, and ultimately build better products and experiences as a result.

Mmm, ok, I don’t remember ever reading anything in the EULA about collecting data whilst I’m playing. Well, come to think of it I don’t ever remember actually reading a EULA fully in the first place for anything. Buy game, click yes (or scroll down and click yes), install and play game.
I’m not against Valve collecting data whilst I’m playing as I love the Half-Life series of games and Episode 1 was intense fun from start to finish. If this data makes Episode 2 even better then great, but tell us that you’re doing it first before we play the game.

Oh yeah, one very important statistic that’s missing is “number of times computer crashed whilst playing Episode 1“. From my own experience it was a right bugger getting the game to work properly as it kept melting my gfx card (ATi 9800 Pro) and rebooting my PC!

2 Comments