Amidst an eruption of personal information and space violations, the place many people use as an escape might not be as safe as anyone guessed.
With the new speculations of Facebook tracking your messages, Google following your every GPS route, and an ongoing war with our government allegedly spying on all of us, it might not come as a surprise that popular MMO player data has been placed for sale via a gamer case study.
Not only are they selling our MMO gaming data, but they’re raking in a pretty steep price of $2,500-$10,000.
What Kind of Report Are We Talking About Here?
According to ReportBuyer.com, this case study includes a general overview of popular MMO games, why they’re so popular, general revenue models, and their expected growth in the general future.
That doesn’t seem too unruly, right? Well, taking a look through the table of contents, you’ll see a section titled: “Exhibit 3: Global Gaming Market Segmentation by Type”
Defining Market Segmentation
For those who are unfamiliar with the term “Market Segmentation,” Travis Bennett, on Udemy.com, sheds light:
The needs of individual customers differ, so it makes sense that a business creates separate offers for each segment of the market. This gives customers a better solution (whether it’s a product or a service), and helps raise profitability in the entire business.
So basically, they’re grouping us into categories to better market their product to our greedy fingertips. However, when you look at some market segmentation categories, you might understand why this news is slightly unsettling:
- Taste
- Income
- Gender
- Opinion
- Education
- Lifestyle
- Age
- Occupation
- etc.
Along with market segmentation, other alarming headings of the table of contents include our “Payment Methods,” “Game Market by Geographical Segmentation 2013,” and other general game data to test how MMOs compete against each other.
Ethical or an Invasion of Our Privacy?
As a recent graduate of an advertising program, this case study doesn’t seem too out there in terms of accessing inappropriate data.
On the other hand, it might take some players off-guard to hear that the major contributors to this study include Blizzard, Electronic Arts, NCSOFT Corp., and more names most gamers would recognize.
It seems that data mining is a real thing ladies and gentlemen, but the question still remains:
Is collecting our MMO gaming data an ethical practice, since it could help developers fine tune games to our preference?
Or, since anyone with $2,500-$10,000 laying around can access it, is that the price our personal payment methods, age, geography, etc. is worth to be exploited?
Seems a little fishy to me.
