> I hope the author is collecting juicy analytics.

I hope they're not. Can't we have a few things in this world that are just fun without going and sticking surveillance on them?

'analytics' and 'surveillance' are not the same thing

trying to understand player behavior in the context of a board or video game (though there is some overlap!) is not the same as trying to understand user behavior in the context of social media or purchasing behavior - the data of both of which derive their value from being sold to THIRD PARTIES as a commodity.

being able to tune a fun little video game is not the same thing at all

Does your opinion change if they use it to train a commercial program to do a similar task?

For me at least, no. Making money by training a model from user data on such a game seems like a perfectly fine thing to do.

Collecting analytics like this is effectively the same as play-testing physical board games in-development. People play a game, information is gathered, and the game is tuned in response to that. If zero information were ever gathered, games could not be balanced or tuned for other things like unforeseen problems.

Please, show me a piece of software, or game, that is perfect the first time it is made.

It's effectively the same, except people volunteer or are paid to play test.

This whole industry really needs a lesson on consent.

So long as personal information is not collected, consent is not morally necessary.

If I collect information on how often a coin-op Street Fighter II game is played in an arcade, while collecting no personal information, consent is not needed.

Because using someone else's hardware in a public space is clearly equivalent to using your own hardware in the privacy of your own home.

You are not entitled to play the game, which is hosted on their server which requires bandwidth and other resources. In the same way that you are free to make demands about how software runs on your machine, the author is free to make demands about the use of their software.

This is software coming from a server, not hardware. It doesn't matter which device it's run on, or whether it's in your home or not.

If the data gathered is only on gameplay, and not something that can be used as PII like IP addresses or device information, then it should be fine. Gathering things like the score and time spent completing the level, isn't a problem. This could be used to rank the levels, without gathering any user information.

If gathering the data should be fine, then asking for permission should also be fine.

Indie games don’t have a budget for playtesting, but they can probably swing a GA account.

There are games that let you opt-out, hell even ones that ask you when you first open the game. There are bad apples, but there are plenty of good ones too.

I think the argument is that they shouldn't be opt-out, but opt-in.

If I want to play a game and provide my feedback, the default should be that that doesn't happen unless I explicitly say it should.

Opt-out means that, by default, you're collecting metrics from my plays, until I find the means to opt-out.

If the game asks you when you first open it, does it matter if the question is to "opt out" or "opt in"?

If it asks you then it's neither opt-in nor opt-out. Then it depends on how it asks you. If it's a simple yes/no, it's fine. If it's typical tech bullshit where your options are a big "I want to make the world a better place and save the whales by sending my data" or a tiny button in the corner labeled "maybe later" that takes you to another screen saying "please confirm you want to opt out of data collection and kill a bunch of kittens" then not so good.

if the analytics lead to an actual game on steam im down

You could just package an arbitrary 100 levels, let the player play them in any order, then give rewards for 10, 20, 30, 40, etc. levels completed/mastered.

This would still benefit from a difficulty rating system or order

Or go full on kaizo Mario and make it a random room out of the 100

naw im looking to have fun, not cry

something in me loves progressively harder levels

It's frankly embarrassing how many of the comments on this thread are some version of looking at the XKCD "dependency" meme and deciding the best course of action is to throw spitballs at the maintainers of the critical project holding everything else up.

I think both of those POVs are wrong. The whole thing about F-Droid is that they have worked hard on not being a central point of trust and failure. The apps in their store are all in a repo (https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata) and they are reproducibly built from source. You could replicate it with not too much effort, and clients just need to add the new repository.

At the very least, it's reasonable to expect the maintainers of such a project to be open about their situation when it's that precarious. Why wouldn't you take every opportunity to let your users and downstream projects know that the dependency you're providing is operating with no redundancy and barely enough resources to carry on when things aren't breaking? Why wouldn't they want to share with a highly technical audience any details about how their infrastructure operates?

> when it's that precarious

assumptions

They're building all the software on a single server, and at best their fallback is a 12 year old server they might be able to put back in production. I'm not making any unreasonable assumptions, and they're not being forthcoming with any reassuring details.

F Droid is no where near being a critical project holding Android up. The Play Store, and the Play Services themselves are much more critical. Being open source doesn't make you immune from criticism for not following industry standards or being called out for poor security.

> The Play Store, and the Play Services themselves are much more critical.

Critical for serving malware and spyware to the masses, yes. GrapheneOS is based on Android and is far better than a Googled Android variant precisely because it is free of Google junk and OEM crapware.

The internet itself is also critical for serving malware and spyware, but that doesn't mean that the internet is garbage. Google invests much more into removing malicous apps from the app store than fdroid does.

If you have nothing to install on your device, what's the point of being able to? For me, f-droid is a cornerstone in the android ecosystem. I could source apks elsewhere but it would be much more of a hassle and not necessarily have automatic updates. iOS would become a lot more attractive to me if Android didn't have the ecosystem that's centered around the open apps that you can find on f-droid

> I've noticed that if I respond to people's emails quickly, they send me more emails.

Many of us have noticed this; it's why we're intentionally slow to respond.

Ditto. I'm a current Ranger owner, now seriously considering the Slate if it actually ever makes it to market.

I know they're marketing on price, but they really whiffed not offering AWD on that thing. Living in the Northwest, that's a total dealbreaker both from a skiing perspective and a getting-to-work-when-it-snows perspective.

The article was interesting, but I feel like the title did not require the click to answer.

"Household wealth" is such a sneaky little phrase from the Economist to make it sounds like we're all equally exposed to this risk.

Honestly, I wonder how some of these publishers stay in business at all. I haven't written a book, but I've been a technical reviewer for friends who have been published with some of the larger technical publishers. Nobody was making money from the process. I do wonder if maybe they're just taking on too many titles and reaching saturation. Do we really need "The guide to making X on Y with Z" for every potential iteration?

> Nobody was making money from the process.

From the people I know who wrote or co-wrote books, the way you make money is in future interview processes.

I don't know if they still do it, but when I interviewed for Google, they had a self-ranking system of how competent you are in each technology, and the only way to get the top score was phrased something like "I wrote the book on it (yes, an actual book)".

> I knew there would be BS like this in the study

If you "know" that a study whose title you are predisposed to disagree with has "BS" in it, something tells me no amount of scientific evidence is going to persuade you.

Not at all, I want the study to be true.

Franchise owner also bear the burden of franchise fees, which pay for these exorbitant executive compensation packages.

And they've been complaining for decades at this point that corporate is failing them. Not enough new products, bad business and advertising strategies, store renos, the list goes on.

The burger flipper making a lot more money is doing a lot more for their franchisee's than the executives are as of late.

The exec comp is a rounding error compared to the other costs of the business.

Sorry, I don't have an iDevice, so I'll have to take comfort in keeping my terminal warm instead.

https://opensource.com/article/18/12/linux-toy-aafire