Developers plan to remove Red Shell from games after “Spyware” complaints
Developers plan to remove Red Shell from games after “Spyware” complaints
A long list of developers have removed the tool so far, or have pledged to do so in the near future including Creative Assembly, Crytek, FatShark Games and Zenimax, bowing down to fan pressure from websites like Reddit and the Steam Forums of applicable games.
Red Shell is designed to measure the effectiveness of a developer’s marketing campaigns, matching system information with marketing data to judge which advertising campaigns have the most impact on customers. This program allows developers to decide how useful specific types of advertisements are, allowing them to allocate their marketing resources more effectively.
Unfortunately, Red Shell shares its name with a Trojan Horse virus that dates back over 14 years, spawning a lot of these complaints when combined with the fact that Red Shell can “collect information including operating system, browser version number, IP address (anonymized through one-way hashing), screen resolution, in-game user id, and font profiles”. Red Shell states in their FAQ that they do not track users outside of applicable games, collect personal information or sell their data to 3rd parties (aside from each game’s marketing team), though this has done little to appease frustrated gamers.
Even now gamers on Reddit are compiling a growing list of games that use Red Hat, prompting players to send complaints to the developers in question pleading that the software is removed from their games.
Is Red Shell Spyware? Probably not, Red Shell has made it clear on several occasions that they only collect information that is necessary to do their jobs and do not sell their data to third parties, though many gamers consider the very presence of a marketing-oriented app in their games offensive.
In many ways, the fears surrounding Red Shell are shared by other 3rd party software solutions like Denuvo, where unsubstantiated claims often gain a lot of traction in the PC gaming community, creating similar backlashes when seemingly unnecessary software (be it DRM or otherwise) are added to a game.
You can join the discussion on developers pledging to remove Red Shell from their games in response “Spyware” criticisms on the OC3D Forums.