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> We were setting it up and it made her put in her email and phone number to verify. I was appalled; I was like don't put in your email! I'll return it! I’m gl

> We were setting it up and it made her put in her email and phone number to verify. I was appalled; I was like don't put in your email! I'll return it! I’m glad to know I’m not the only one still trying to fight this fight. It’s really starting to be a problem with games. Buying games during the holiday Steam sales used to be a big part of my holiday break, something that was my way of winding down after a long year. But I’ve made it a personal policy to refund any game that requires an account to play (I only play single player games, there’s no reason for games to have my email.) Nowadays this means basically all AAA games are off limits to me. Gaming in general is becoming less and less of my life as a result. I had originally hoped that some PM somewhere would see refunds coming with “requires signup” as the reason, and would maybe second guess requiring signin for future games, but it just keeps getting more and more ubiquitous. At this point I’m just saying farewell to gaming. It was once something that gave me a lot of pleasure, but I can’t participate in this industry any more. There’s other things I can do with my time.

bryguy32403 5y ago
It's even worse with games. If you buy a game on steam, steam has an account api that is completely usable for online play, but the game companies want more data so they force you to make an account with them. I have a stadia account and I've taken to doing the same thing. If i go to play a game and the first thing it wants me to do is create an account, I'm not playing that game, and I'm telling support about it.
- noduerme 5y ago
  Why not just set up a throwaway email for all of it? =\
  - ninkendo 5y ago
    For me, it's the principal of the thing. It's not that it's such a terrible thing for a company to know my email address (especially when apple makes it trivial to create throwaway ones for your iCloud account, their "hide my email" feature has improved so that now you can just make bespoke randomly generated email addresses that look exactly like an unassuming iCloud account, but forward to yours.) The reason I do this is because I am so fundamentally against the concept of a gaming company harvesting personal information about its users, that I feel like a shitty person for being complicit in it. I'd rather miss out on the occasional good game than be "part of the problem".
noduerme 5y ago
Heh. We have a similar philosophy. And I'm always a fan of quitting gaming (like I'm a fan of quitting drinking; I'm pretty sure I could do it if I wanted to). I was a lucky foo who registered a lot of mail.yahoo and gmail accounts before they checked identity, but it's still totally possible to be semi-anonymous these days. I have a couple burner phones; once you bootstrap a google ID it's not that hard to move it around. But also, buy a bunch of cheap ass domains, you can get all the inbound mail you want. Outbound is a little trickier, but who fucking cares. Highly recommend just for your sanity that you invest the time to set up a few fake identities while you're refusing to game... it's not going to get any easier in 2023. [edit] I should clarify that I'm probably such an asshole, I didn't even suggest letting my gf use one of my fake accounts to set up the Roku. Not that she gave me a chance; she was already done with the verification email by the time I started decrypting my list of them.

bryguy32403 5y ago

It's even worse with games. If you buy a game on steam, steam has an account api that is completely usable for online play, but the game companies want more data so they force you to make an account with them. I have a stadia account and I've taken to doing the same thing. If i go to play a game and the first thing it wants me to do is create an account, I'm not playing that game, and I'm telling support about it.

noduerme 5y ago
Why not just set up a throwaway email for all of it? =\
- ninkendo 5y ago
  For me, it's the principal of the thing. It's not that it's such a terrible thing for a company to know my email address (especially when apple makes it trivial to create throwaway ones for your iCloud account, their "hide my email" feature has improved so that now you can just make bespoke randomly generated email addresses that look exactly like an unassuming iCloud account, but forward to yours.) The reason I do this is because I am so fundamentally against the concept of a gaming company harvesting personal information about its users, that I feel like a shitty person for being complicit in it. I'd rather miss out on the occasional good game than be "part of the problem".

noduerme 5y ago

Heh. We have a similar philosophy. And I'm always a fan of quitting gaming (like I'm a fan of quitting drinking; I'm pretty sure I could do it if I wanted to). I was a lucky foo who registered a lot of mail.yahoo and gmail accounts before they checked identity, but it's still totally possible to be semi-anonymous these days. I have a couple burner phones; once you bootstrap a google ID it's not that hard to move it around. But also, buy a bunch of cheap ass domains, you can get all the inbound mail you want. Outbound is a little trickier, but who fucking cares. Highly recommend just for your sanity that you invest the time to set up a few fake identities while you're refusing to game... it's not going to get any easier in 2023. [edit] I should clarify that I'm probably such an asshole, I didn't even suggest letting my gf use one of my fake accounts to set up the Roku. Not that she gave me a chance; she was already done with the verification email by the time I started decrypting my list of them.