What's with the animosity? There seems to have been a lot of effort put into Defold, the least you could do is appreciate the fact it's been made available free of charge and royalties.
Currently, your projects can only be stored on King's servers, not even github. When you finally publish your game, it will automatically include analytics that phone home to King, not you.
Nothing is sent to any King servers, unless you actually want to use our analytics tools, which is an opt-in solution anyway. :)
The only reason why projects are hosted on our servers is due to the legacy of the engine, originally planned as a subscription service, long before being acquired by King. This is something that really wasn't a problem up until now, which is why it simply has stayed that way.
We want it to be easy for users to just create a project and start coding, not having to spend time on setting up development environment and code hosting. However, of course we see this is something people want to be able do as well. We will add the ability to more easily configure where projects are hosted (or even use local projects (already added to the new editor)).
"We provide data collection and statistics of your players, if you want it – In order to provide Player Analytics, we need to collect data on your Players such as how they play Games and what device they used. If you choose not to use Player Analytics, we won’t collect any data relating to Players (except for errors directly related to the Defold Engine). Please see our Privacy Policy for Players http://www.defold.com/about-player-privacy/ for more information about what Player data we collect and what we do with it."
Interesting. There wasn't any way to turn it off when I last checked, but that was last year (during beta). Hopefully they'll allow you to get rid of it completely, but it still feels too much like my game would be tied up with King in some way, and I'd never want that.
No, we collect no data about your users unless you use our analytics service. If you need analytics and does not want to use ours you can roll your own.
What kind of scheming do you believe we are up to? I'm asking because we really want to do the right thing and be open about Defold. Maybe you have questions we have failed to answer properly?
I don't really wanna defend King.com, but I think you're being a bit uncharitable. They talk about the community "creating tutorials, by finding bugs, improving the documentation". It's just tautological that you'll get more bug reports the more users you have, and creating tutorials/refining documentation are particularly suited to crowdsourcing (as the designers are often too close to the application to understand what a newbie needs to know).
And how is that a bad thing? You're missing the fact that people "testing" it are consumers, meaning any improvements will benefit them as well. Sounds like a win-win to me.
Never buying or using anything from those sleazeballs, and you should follow suit.