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[Grildon Tundy]

Would you like to link your Steam account to Epic Games Stores?
Link your Amazon Prime account to GOG?
Link EA to Game Pass?
Link Playstation account to Square Enix/Bungie/Blizzard/etc?
Link Ubisoft Connect to Game Pass?
Would you like to sign in via Google/Facebook/Email?

By doing so, you get free items, games, discounts, and more!

As we've all heard, if you're not paying for something, you are the product.

So with all these incentives to intermingle your accounts, what is the real purpose? What do the companies gain?

My first thought is that Big Data wants a "key" to link you, as a person, across all digital spaces, and linking game service accounts enables them to track your gaming activity. Is that the reason? What can they actually learn from analyzing your data? Do these companies that allow account linking between themselves have agreements with each other to feed gamers' activities into internal algorithms to determine how to design their next games to increase engagement? Does how you play/which genres/for how long somehow give them insight into your non-gaming purchasing habits that can be sold to advertisers?

Is it as innocuous as them actually wanting to reward their fans (LOL)?

There's such a huge push for it, but it's unclear to me, so I'm curious what you all think.

 

[Danny Dudekisser]

In a lot of cases, there's some behind the scenes shit where, by opening up account linking, one company will give the other company some of their games on the other platform, which can be really useful in spurring interest. There's also typically significant marketing support that's offered in exchange. Money often doesn't change hands with these deals - it's primarily marketing value. For Ubisoft or EA, there's gonna be some sort of minimum guarantee involved, though... as you'd probably expect.

Source: Self. I've worked on this sorts of arrangements ad nauseam.