Owlcat Games has yanked a controversial new player-tracking tool from Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous just a day after introducing it. On Monday, July 24, Owlcat introduced update 2.1.5m, a hefty patch to the game that—amidst all the bugfixes and tweaks you'd expect from this kind of thing—introduced AppsFlyer, described by Owlcat as "an industry standard tracking solution" that "allows developers and publishers to understand which part of players have purchased the game due to the impact of their advertising campaigns".
An analytics tool, basically. Owlcat explained in a Q&A on the Steam forums for Wrath of the Righteous that AppsFlyer works by sucking up your IP address, timestamp (when you launched the game), platform, the version of the game you're running, and your OS. It uses that data to create a fingerprint that it then matches against data provided by advertisers, giving Owlcat a rough idea of how many people bought the game after seeing an ad for it online.
