I had a long post typed out, but I want to give the dev a chance to answer before I post it. So, a few questions:
- Why are you using Unity's PlayerPrefs to store full save games, as well as (quite literally) tens of thousands of stats? This is all stored in the registry, which is not a proper place for either of these. This functionality offers developers a place to store settings (as hinted at by the term "Prefs" meaning "Preferences") ... not game data. Quite literally every time you click on something a registry key (or more, depending on what you clicked) is updated. The registry is not your personal database.
- You have two pop ups every time someone starts the game, which is not just annoying but it's also a perfect opportunity to inform players that you're sending data to google and unity* that many would find to be a huge invasion of privacy.
1) Why aren't you telling us about this?
2) Why is there no option to disable it?
3) Are you making money off of these analytics that are being sent? If so, do you not see the conflict in all of the begging for people to join your Patreon as often as you do? Play the game for 5 minutes and you've seen 7 Patreon ads. This is, quite honestly, why I started digging around. You're overly annoying with all the begging for supporters on Patreon.
4) What is the privacy policy of your company and your game, and how does it square with the data you send? Does it conform to the EU's GDPR?
5) Speaking of those two pop ups, you claim in the second that "Game is free, with no ads or payments." That's not accurate, is it? You advertise your Patreon everywhere - including a permanent location on every screen (bottom left corner).
* - Unity itself collects data and sends it, and in many cases the developer has no way to turn it off. This, however, is not that. This is this developer explicitly sending data to Unity (and google) without your knowledge or your consent.
I've already deleted this game from my hard drive, but I think the others deserve answers to these questions. I have a sneaky suspicion there's more going on here than I was able to find, but without evidence I will make no accusation. In my brief time looking through the code I found plenty to completely dissuade me from wanting it on my system at all.
You can copy the save file, but it will do you no good because the dev decided (for whatever reason) to store a LOT of the information in the registry. Because of that, it's not impossible to copy save games, as the dev claimed elsewhere in this thread, but it's not something that typical users will find to be an easy task to accomplish. As you can see above, I asked why they've done this. It's a bit.. bewildering of a choice.
Thank you for your questions, especially that you decided to ask us question before writing hate, I honor that. I will try to answer and address all your questions. I have returned from the hospital only recently and used just my left hand to write so I apologize for typos first hands. (Carpal tunnel syndrome procedure so I was not around to reply earlier)
Saving to registry - it is actually Playerprefs, and it is not our invention every single unity game uses them, in short they are used to store settings and small basic information. It is common and isolated to individual game bundle. People often hear ''registry'' and freak out but in reality it's like 100 values all at one place by project name, eg. not spread everywhere causing issues. We also some time ago as people suggested on this forum switched to saving games to files, despite not being 100% (they don't save global information like all settings or all saves just one save) I will explain why we used them later in this post.
Here is example how the folder looks on my pc including save thumbnails:
And here is an example of the save:
We are not tracking individual or personal information of our players aside that from most basic statistics like number of downloads on filesharing services like mega.nz or google drive or average session time. Our team has 2 members; graphic designer and me as a programmer who are putting game game content pieces all together. We have google analytics turned off in the project and unity analytics does not send individual game data, it only tracks game start and game end time as type of session data like what platform it was run on. It doesn't provide any detailed data anyway in it, and we are talking only about session, not user data, not privacy data, no IT address, it is part of every unity project and many assets depend on it.
Besides it was all mentioned in our privacy policy on our website (link on the very bottom)
We had older version on our discord too, but you are right I will include link with a checkbox to it in the game as well when it starts in next game versions. If you find it irritating it opens up every time I can put it on our todo list to remember the choice and on next start of the game for it to not pop up.
Good example is the report bug or submit idea in the game - they all link to an web anonymous google forms to submit feedback to our e-mail where it is clearly written we have no way to know who wrote us what and if anyone want oir reply they need to add contact there. This is in the game for since first releases , why would we make it if we would be able to send such info directly from the game, its simple we are not sending out any personal information about individual users who play the game.
Game does not need to have internet connection to play it and there are no ads from 3rd party only few buttons with a name patreon or link to discord in main menu and in certain 2-3 options. Also important note is we removed many of occurences that felt spammy over the years. We will keep patron button in the game as it is only way to support our game for people who want it and in exchange they can influence the game by patreon voting and get early access.
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Regarding what unity tracks, we don’t use anything more than very basic statistical data available on each site where our game is located eg. Itch.io has their website statistics, our website too with cookies following eu laws and similarly these track only downloads per day and not individual user information. We also don’t trade sell or send this data to anyone as our focus as indie atudio is on the game content and taboo fantasies, we are not interested in anything more than making a good game in our free time after work.at not its not very clear, but full information is available on the unity3d technologies licence agreenment and we have information on our website.
Why we choose unity engine?
In short our team had 3 members and one member knew ren'py but after 2 years on development he stepped out of the project and I was not able to continue develop in ren'py as it was at the time (5years ago + colleague used bad code documentation) Also at that time it was problematic to port game to different platforms without issues and many other restraints that came with it like mini games creation and generally we wanted to be an unique game. That meant to rather create unique stuff than reuse everything from ren'py engineand look same as majority other vn games. So I knew unity (I used to work on android games there before), so we put all story texts and images to unity as it was a known technology for our team, that’s all and nothing more nothing less.
Our objective is to work on the content of the game and make decent taboo fantasy visual novel with elements of open world gameplay dating different girl characters and we have made a lot of updates which went free usually within weeks after early access and beta tests proove they work. We use donations to be able work on the game and make new content. Game is time costly and only way for us to keep more content coming is to sustain development of the project. We do not want to add paid segments as DLC or spamming ads into the gameplay as many other devs does. One important note here that we are communicating openly even if it means being brutally honest and the fact I am here talking regullary to people who review our game negatively means we are trying what we can to help, provide answers and more than anywhere on our patreon and discord channels. Everyone is welcome to join it is free and we often discuss game content there.
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As you mentioned to have deleted our game that is your choice of course and no there is nothing more happening in the background, and I hope I was able to answer all your questions with clarity, calmly and reasonable.
PS: Sorry for typo errors, I wrote most of this using only left hand and method of ''flying eagle circling around keyboard''
