Questions about Defold analytics

Will this be supported long term? I’d like to use it, but not if it’s planned to be shut down in the future.

Is it possible to enable/disable analytics via scripting? I would like to give users the option to opt in to tracking and not make it a requirement or on by default.

What privacy policy governs the analytics so that I can link to it for users to know how their data is protected?

2 Likes

Hey!

There’s no plan at all to shut down Defold Analytics – on the contrary, we see it as a core part of the product, and plan to implement more features (e.g. custom events) in the future.

The policy which governs the privacy aspects is Terms of Service, in which you can find “Player Privacy Policy” which governs the players’ aspects.

Regarding the opt-in/opt-out – what I know, it’s currently not possible to disable/enable as a single user (maybe @sven knows more?), but unless you opt-in to the service, no data is collected (except from anonymous crash logs) from the users.

3 Likes

There is no way to disable analytics per user at this moment, but it sounds like a good feature. :slight_smile:

We don’t store any crash logs automatically either, it’s up to the game maker to implement this using the crash.* module. :thumbsup:

4 Likes

Not even anonymous crash logs are sent.

In case of a crash information is written to a specific file named _crash, only information about the last crash is stored, so no history is kept. The content of this file can be retrieved using the function crash.load_previous() (http://www.defold.com/ref/crash/#crash.load_previous) when the game is started again. In case people encounter crashes we would of course be very happy to get this information.

4 Likes

Thanks for the clarification! Misinterpreted the “We might gather crash-logs to help fix problems - In addition to the information listed in this Player Privacy Policy we may gather aggregated and anonymous data about crashes and problems in the Defold Engine to identify bugs and issues.” paragraph from the Player Privacy Policy.

1 Like

Is opt in for analytics on the radar yet? I’d still like to use Defold analytics but not unless I can enable users to opt into participating with it.

No, not really. I can’t remember a game where I as a user was given a choice. My gut feeling is that most games collect data from all or no users and there is no way for the user to make a choice. Gathering usage data (not user data) is such a key feature of successfully launching a game nowadays (to measure retention, tweak game difficulty etc) that I can’t imagine not doing it.

I agree it’s important, but there are still classes of games where you should want to give the option to opt in. I bet that in the coming years it will be more common for analytics to be opt in only by default.