Posted January 22, 2015
Lukaszmik: (...) I wanted to believe that, as a gamer, I will have a place to get games that will let me do this with minimal hassle (no DRM). But I also assumed you would have similar stance to other things, such as respect for personal privacy. (...)
I can't speak from a technical standpoint on this, but I want to explain why we use things that tell us how the general public (unidentifiable customers) behave on the site. Imagine you have a website and you're trying to convince someone to sell their product on it, under conditions they did not previously accept, or were hesitant to. Do you go to them telling them that it's great, or do you show them numbers? That x% of people that visit your site through a link to a product look at another product, or that they spend Y minutes browsing it on average?
Also, when you're hired by the company to do a certain job, you report on it. Say your job is "increase sales by linking to the site correctly". If you track links with Google Analytics, you can get aggregated data on how many clicked the link. If you can combine that with a number of people that saw the link (i.e. newsletters opened), you have a percentage of people that you brought in - meaning you did your job, and it's quantifiable how well it went.
We need these (general and aggregated) numbers 1) to convince developers that it's worth it to work with us (therefore bringing more games), and 2) to quantify how well we do what we do in the aspect of providing you content and games you're interested in.
There's probably other reasons for other departments as well (such as: "is that tab really necessary?" for the developers or something), but getting some data about user behaviour is a big thing that helps us get other big things done. :)