Link: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/resident-evil-makers-capcom-reveal-data-breach-has-affected-over-11-million-capcom-id-accounts-warn-against-potential-phishing-emails

Resident Evil, Street Fighter, and Monster Hunter publishers Capcom have revealed that a data breach has seen a third-party gain access to information associated with more than 11 million Capcom ID accounts. "Suspicious activity" around the service, required to play online in the likes of Street Fighter 6, was initially noticed on October 19th according to Capcom, who have spent the past couple of days taking measures to contain and combat the problem.

I just signed up for an account last week. New personal "best" - Time to a breach.

Damn, I wonder why people are becoming averse to online accounts...

This calls for a new speedrun category!

Game publishers never need to collect and hoard PII, and they need to be ridiculed and shamed when they do, especially when they require it.

Have people ever not been averse to online accounts like this?

Good thing I pirate all Capcom games

Was it required? IIRC they used it for telemetry purposes or whatever. Was there content or any kind of gameplay item that was gatekept behind the user having a Capcom ID? I may be misremembering, but I think I just declined when the game prompted me to create an ID.

I haven't played the most recent ones though, so maybe the made it mandatory?

It doesn't make it any less stupid, I'm just curious. I don't think a single player game should be tied to an external account.

we are the minority. say “Steam,” and valve drones swarm.

My direct experience is with Ubisoft and Bethesda, which require signing in with an account specific to them if the device you’re playing on has internet access during game start up.

I don’t play much myself anymore, in large part because of this excessive entitlement publishers assume.

Most people are not adverse even after all the breaches because "that's just how things works" or some other coping mechanism.

These accounts are for playing online, not buying games.

I mean, we can take a very simple design idea to test this:

For your first quest, you do a fetch quest. But it turns out, gamers hate fetch quests!
We know such a result from colloquial knowledge and hundreds of hours spent watching armchair design essays. But game designers don’t have hundreds of hours, but they want hundreds of answers, based on more than video whims. Even indie devs (you can see a lot of them in NextFest) may make really bad design decisions for their little games.

In the HL2 commentaries, you see Valve gets tons of in-person QA feedback at their Seattle office. That’s great if they have the resources to arrange it. Take me though. My testing is “please read my book - no controller required” and that’s astoundingly hard to push on random people, to the point some would consider paying individual players/testers/readers.

From that standpoint, collecting metrics doesn’t seem so unreasonable. I get that data collection is an evil and ruthless business at its extreme end, but “How many players found this menu” just seems mutually beneficial to know.

Pseudoanonymised telemetry is very different from explicit PII. Collecting the former is perfectly cromulent, hoarding the latter is indefensible.

Publishers can't be ridiculed because they are ridiculous already!

Good thing I pirate all Capcom games

My name is Jackson Halsk and I live at 44 Disk Dr

If only AI had been invented it would have saved us all! /s

Roblox trained them well