The people at GameAnalytics recently released an officially maintained SDK for Roblox games that you can just drag and drop into your games and start using GA straight away. (I believe it is inspired by a module made by @gillern)
You can find it here:
Link to blog post about it:
This is pretty nice because you can be sure that they will actively maintain this in case any new features are added to GameAnalytics that any user-made modules do not support, and you can file bug reports at their account rather than needing to dive into it yourself.
It also seems like it’s published on Github here (GitHub - GameAnalytics/GA-SDK-ROBLOX: Repository for GameAnalytics Roblox SDK), but it is published there in binary form, so it’s hard to include as a submodule in your projects or contribute to the project unfortunately, if you are used to working with third party tooling. (I’m going to submit a feature request for them to list it as separate .lua files so that this becomes possible)
They do a global analysis on all data stored on their service and sell insights on that data to third parties (like industry trends, high-level common spending patterns, etc). And you need to make sure you meet the GPDR when you submit data on players to their service.
How would you go about totally annonymizing your data? A practical example would help because I’m having a hard time picturing what this would look like from a developer’s perspective.
We’re following up with GameAnalytics for clarification to help Roblox developers answer any questions about their SDK implementation; if you have any others regarding the new GameAnalytics SDK, please reply to this message.
EDITED: The follow-up includes clarification around the collection and use of player data, as well as developers’ requirements regarding getting players’ consent.
Hi guys, Chay here from GameAnalytics. Now that we’ve released the patched Roblox SDK I wanted to add some more information about this comment and the comments of a few other posters…
We do publish a series of industry benchmarks with insights about the gaming sector, which are available for free to all game developers and intended to help them build better games. We include actionable tips and advice based on the industry as a whole, and the data is aggregated by genre or metric type. Our community has responded very positively to these reports, as it helps them assess how they compare to the overall industry. Our latest report of this type is available here:
We never share, publish or sell user data to external third parties. Thousands of studios trust us with their data, and we take their privacy extremely seriously.
In our terms of service we do mention “third parties” - this clause was included in our updated terms earlier this year for GDPR. It doesn’t mean that we’re sharing data with third parties, rather that we are a third party data processor and that it’s recommended that you as a developer communicate this + request consent in some way for this processing with your players (data subjects) based in the EU. As another poster has mentioned, this is best practice and something you should be thinking about doing anyway if you have a global player base.
Regarding “cutting service” for games that aren’t compliant, we would never do that without warning and opportunity to rectify the situation. If we identify a game that isn’t compliant during a random audit then we reach out directly to the developer via email and work closely with them over several weeks to advise how to put GDPR compliant practices in place. We’d only cut service to a game if all communication (or our advice) is ignored.
We recently posted a blog on this topic with some actionable tips and steps to ensure GDPR compliance:
