[2019] EPIC buy EAC, time to worry?

We have no reason to go epic exclusive nor drop EAC so there's no cause to worry.

We use steam for almost everything; from mods to networking, it would be far too costly even if we had anything to gain by going epic store exclusive.

Originally posted by Zordan Grey: Epic bought EAC so they can have access to all the meta data that the anti-cheat program gathers from it's users. That is why now i shop only from GOG and don't bother with 99% of online games. I am sick and tired for being used by companies so they can push more ads onto me by predicting my purchasing habits from the data they've obtained. Remember when Vermintide 2 had Red Shell on it? Same thing only slightly different.

Now that's some uninspired conspiracy crafting, right there...

First of all, EAC doesn't collect any user data in VT2 as we don't use that module (it's called Hydra I believe if you want to look it up (and it's used for cheat tracking, not ad tracking)).

Second of all, Red Shell isn't for pushing ads, it's for tracking if an ad resulted in a purchase so it allowed us to see what ad platforms were actually giving us sales (so, if the same person clicked an ad that also played the game, there's a very high chance that ad was instrumental to that purchase). Basically, it allowed us to spend our ad money at the sites that actually worked (potentially allowing us to spend *less* money on ads). But, our customers didn't like us using it, so we stopped. If you didn't click any ads, the only information we had was that you hadn't clicked our ads or done so in such a way that we weren't able to link the two instances together.

Thirdly, you want to know the reason they bought EAC? Well, they use EAC in Fortnite.

If you had the biggest western game in the world and you're relying heavily on a third party middleware to make that game succesful, that's not ideal from a security point of view. That it also happens to be one of the best anti-cheats out there and that there are a ton of potential other uses for it, well, that's likely just bonus.


If you're really afraid of getting tracked for ads, here are some quick tips:
- install a web browser that actually can protect your integrity, turn off cookies and always use private mode
- don't use facebook
- don't use google
- don't use anything related to apple

Game developers have far more useful things and profitable things to do than try to do what facebook and google already does a billion times better. We simply don't have the numbers, the crunching power nor the motivation to try to get into that scene.

edit: fixed a typo