For context, Larian Studio founder Swen Vincke predicted that the game could reach 100,000 peak concurrent users during its debut period, and that was a fairly optimistic prediction. I work in IT, and really feel for those folks. I hope they designed their infrastructure to scale!
And that’s only Steam, not including GOG, or the influx of PS5 users next month. Let’s take it to 1 million!
Thank you for the insights. While I think I knew a lot of this on some level, it always helps to have it pointed out. I guess what I find enchanting is Larian’s willingness to share some of that data with us. It’s not something I have spent much time thinking about, and is much more Black Mirror than I assumed. A little scary, really. I thought it was just me by myself playing this game.
For what it’s worth - you are one of millions of entries in a server somewhere. It is extraordinarily unlikely that anyone would look at you in particular.
There’s a list of user IDs that devs can map to various tables. These tables can be device information (OS, GPU, CPU, RAM), graphics settings, framerate data, player character details, whatever. They would basically have to know what your player character’s name is and use that to find your unique ID, which would in turn be able to be used as a lookup for the other tables. (It’s possible that they also log your Steam ID or something but I’ve never seen that happen. Certainly possible though.)
More likely, unless you did something that made you stand out (like you are an obvious cheater, or you were the only player in the whole world to do something, which happens) your data just gets put in a bunch of graphs and averaged out. Then some data guy gives a presentation in a boring meeting where the graphs are presented and analyzed. Conclusions are drawn and then producers chase you down to fix the things based on those conclusions. Rinse and repeat.
There are times where I would find someone doing something that should be impossible, and then I poke at the data to figure out why. Usually that gives me an idea on where a bug could be. But you’re one entry among millions; it’s statistically extremely unlikely that you are the standout that gets analyzed - and if you are, it’s not necessarily the case that they dig deep into everything you’ve ever done.
You can pretty much assume this about every game these days, by the way. Singleplayer, multiplayer… if a AAA publisher is involved, they’ll all do it. Starfield will certainly do it too.
You can probably use Wireshark to peek at the data being sent, if you’re really curious. Multiplayer games I worked on did this stuff server-side when possible to avoid players using Wireshark to look at everything, but singleplayer games don’t have that luxury. I doubt they encrypt the data (but it’s possible).
“you are one of millions of entries in a server somewhere” … that makes me feel better. /s
Have you watched DEVS? This feels a lot like that.