Unity Unreal Engine Anonymously publish games?

[Ender011]

Does anyone know if either Unity or Unreal engine embeds user data about the publisher into the build?

I'm less worried about people from Unity/Unreal being able to track my project back to me and more worried about potential users sifting through the data.
With that being said, any insight into the user data that's being put out there would be greatly appreciated!

 

[JakaiD]

tl;dr: No, but ...

I do not have that much eperience with Unreal but in Unity you have fields where you can enter things like your company name, game title, and version. These are mainly used for the build and folder names. Log files and persitant data for example goes into a user_folder/company_name/game_name/ so if you enter your name in those settings this would become visible as folder names and as some strings stored in the binary data of the game.

 

[hardwire666]

There's a place in the project settings where you can additional information, however other than that so far as I know UE doesn't retain anything you don't manually input. Your best bet is to go to the "Unreal Slackers" discord and ask there. The only kind of automatic data tracking that the engine should be doing is for error/crash reports. Which is only triggered when there is a crash.

However, I have never really looked into it. I just know if UE was tracking user/dev info I probably would have heard about it by now as I have been messing with Unreal since the late 90's early 2000's. As well I'm fairly sure the entire community that uses Unreal for non-profit/hobby stuff would blow a gasket.

Also, Tim Sweeny is pretty hard against that kind of stuff. He's ragged on Apple for "scary data collection" for a long time.

So, yeah. If you want to know more head over to that discord. People are typically pretty helpful.

 

[cooperdk]

If you do not want to risk being exposed, simple.

Do not develop anything.

You may not be exposed thru the development tool, but did you consider that based on your residence, you might be required give out sales information when selling your game - and if you're not your company, then you must use your name.
Also, the various backer sites may be required to relinquish your contact information upon request.

So... if you are afraid to be found out, don't make a game.

 

[JakaiD]

I think the question is more about the casual observer noting who the developer of a game is rather than going out of their way to poke at Steam, Itch, EGS, etc for information? Steam for ex would not provide your real identity and tax info to just any rando.