[filoleg]

>Identifying how a user dies is a fantastic way to identify items which can be sold to prevent those common deaths.

Just as commonly, it is done to identify bugs and issues, tweak the game balance to get it to a better state, or to see which things players like to do (as opposed to what they say on forums and in focus groups) in order to provide more of similar features.

It is no different from engagement logging in a lot of applications. It is far from always being done for the purpose of monetization. If my business application has a lot of users stuck on a particular screen for prolonged periods of time due to the UX being confusing, I would want to know about it and address it. A lot of times it is hard to gauge how bad it is, because users might just tolerate it if it is ok, or maybe it is something users attribute to their own fault (i.e., they might feel it is just them being confused about it, not that the UX is confusing for everyone). Engagement logging would help me identify that problem and pinpoint it very fast.

>How do you know [they are not using it for monetizing]?

How do you know they are? I am more surprised they didn't have that type of telemetry already for a while, because that's one of the most common ways to identify pain-points in the gameplay balancing, which features might need more attention/rework, identifying potentially very tricky to catch bugs, and come up with ideas for new feature ideas that users might like based on actual data (as opposed to hearsay and public feedback, which can get significantly skewed by selection bias and other factors).