
I hope this clarifies exactly what it does and is used for.Īlso, RedShell is run by innervate, a small company that is local to Seattle - we know the folks who work there, they built our forums and help us run those too. E.g “People who discovered the game through Facebook tend to struggle to get through this part of the tutorial, we should look into why that’s happening” etc. RedShell only knows about the ID they make and your Account ID that we make, so we can connect our other analytics back to ads as well. They hash the data so it’s stored anonymously, and they don’t sell it to anyone besides us. They aren’t collecting any additional data. If it does, we see a “Conversion” marked for that ad. They generate an ID the same way and see if it matches any of the IDs that have clicked on one of our ads. When you run the game, we fire off a call to RedShell. If you click on an ad, which we set up to redirect through RedShell, RedShell gives you an ID based on your system that is unique.

We’ll be using it to see which ads are working and which aren’t. Thank you Wizards for the response and for respecting your community. I think I can speak for the community when I say that an official WOTC response on this issue would be appreciated, with that response hopefully being an apology for not disclosing the inclusion of Red Shell, and outlining plans for its removal.Įdit: Red Shell has been removed from MTG Arena. It's worth noting that this is now illegal under GDPR, and the fact that this has not been disclosed is not a good look. What does this do? It collects user information, ostensibly for developers to have data that they can analyze to improve the game, but the potential for harvesting a lot more than that is there.


There are also references to Red Shell initializing in captured game logs. Unfortunately upon searching for the RedShellSDK.dll file, I found a copy in the Arena directory. I saw a thread on the steam subreddit about this spyware: Īfter reading through the thread I noticed that it only concerned steam games (as to be expected in the steam subreddit), so I decided to poke around in some other games I have.
