Recently, we published an anonymous editorial from a veteran free-to-play producer that talked about the massive swath of data that these companies are collecting, buying, and selling to each other, all in an attempt to extract some more cash from potential whales. There were some doubts about the veracity of that story, but it turns out companies are far from hiding their collection, aggregation and sharing of data. In fact, advertising firm Kochava has just launched The Collective, which doesn’t do a great job at not sounding like a super-ominous entity to be terrified of. The goal of The Collective? To collect and share all the valuable data about users so that developers and publishers can identify where the users are that they want to target, combining disparate forms of data for hyper-focused targeting, hopefully causing marketers’ money to be spent on the right potential customers.
This sort of thing is interesting because, well, you can act like this perhaps we should have some huge problem with the idea that multinational corporations know everything about us and are using and aggregating this data in ways that they’re not even bothering to hide any more. In fact, they’re building potentially-lucrative businesses where they say up front that this is what they are doing.But, then again, people decided that they didn’t need to spend money up front on games (or any kind of media) any more, and so we’re in a point where, well, this is the world we live in. We all carry around GPS-enabled devices that communicate with servers all over the globe on a whim and it’s second nature to us, perhaps this is the future we deserve. You could go live in a cave, I guess. Or you could instead buy games from developers who just want a few bucks instead of every piece of data they could possibly collect.
