Thank you Wizards for the response and for respecting your community. To stop receiving that notification, just click it and select the box that says 'do not notify me about this update', then close the window. That is probably why you received Magic Desktop upgrade notification. I think I can speak for the community when I say that an official WOTC response on this issue would be appreciated, with that response hopefully being an apology for not disclosing the inclusion of Red Shell, and outlining plans for its removal.Įdit: Red Shell has been removed from MTG Arena. Magic Desktop is a program that was pre-installed on some HP computers, the updater service was also included. It's worth noting that this is now illegal under GDPR, and the fact that this has not been disclosed is not a good look.

What does this do? It collects user information, ostensibly for developers to have data that they can analyze to improve the game, but the potential for harvesting a lot more than that is there.

There are also references to Red Shell initializing in captured game logs. Unfortunately upon searching for the RedShellSDK.dll file, I found a copy in the Arena directory.

I saw a thread on the steam subreddit about this spyware: Īfter reading through the thread I noticed that it only concerned steam games (as to be expected in the steam subreddit), so I decided to poke around in some other games I have. Magic Desktop is an educational and parental control software that enables children to safely and easily use computers.

Magic desktop spyware