Gearbox and Take-Two Interactive’s Borderlands 4 has launched to cries of “pretty good” from (some) professional reviewers, and “Stutterland bugfest” from a vocal portion of the Steam playerbase. In amongst the complaints about performance, there are some fears about potential breaches of player privacy supposedly allowed for by Take-Two’s terms of service. A Borderlands developer has now responded to these fears in the Steam forums, reiterating that Take-Two at large aren’t in the business of “spyware”.
“Take-Two does not use spyware in its games,” reads the statement on Steam. “Take-Two’s Privacy Policy applies to all labels, studios, games, and services across all media and platform types such as console, PC, mobile app, and website. The Privacy Policy identifies the data activities that may be collected but this does not mean that every example is collected in each game or service.
“Take-Two identifies these practices in its Privacy Policy to provide transparency to players and comply with its legal obligations,” it goes on. “Take-Two collects this information to deliver its services to players, including to protect the game environment and player experience.”
The statement gives a couple of examples of more innocuous data collection, such as sponging up player and device identifiers to ensure compatibility with platforms, or making usernames visible to other players, together with more ambiguous practices like gathering data “to better understand how players play games”.
Take-Two have been caught deploying some pretty
insalubrious data collection software in the past. As reported by Alice O (RPS in peace) in 2018, Civilization 6 once made use of Red Shell software to track certain system data, in a bid to identify whether people who’ve clicked on adverts for games then proceed to buy them.
The Steam statement also seeks to clarify Take-Two’s policy towards mods, noting that they “prohibit mods that allow users to gain an unfair advantage, negatively impact the ability of other users to enjoy the game as intended, or allow users to gain access to content that the user is not entitled to”, but do not “generally” take action against mods “that are single-player only, non-commercial, and respect the intellectual property (IP) rights of [their] labels and third parties.” I’m not that familiar with the Borderlands modding scene, but Take-Two and subsidiary Rockstar Games have a legendarily iffy relationship with GTA modders.
As reported by Perignon Champagne Gamer, the concern about Take-Two spyware in Borderlands games dates back at least to May this year, when a Youtuber video about the publisher’s recently revised TOS sparked a short-lived uproar.
I do not want to hand over any of my data to any particular large corporation, myself, but I have to say, I don’t see anything in that TOS that strikes me as out of the ordinary, for better and worse. Suspicion is the appropriate response to such things, but exaggeration helps nobody. I’ve read a few comments that assume that Take-Two are automatically hoovering up everything mentioned in the list of possible data types collected, the second you boot up a game, rather than when you deliberately opt into certain services, such as Borderlands 4’s irritating SHiFT service for cross-play.
I am adding “interview somebody to do a proper explainer about data collection practices and privacy” to our endlessly extendable, usefully hypothetical Long Term Features trello. While we’re at it, we could look into related anxieties about anti-cheat and DRM, which have recently resurfaced thanks to Call Of Duty and Battlefield requiring that you enable secure boot on PC.
The TOS aside, some Borderlands 4 players are concerned about the game’s usage of two types of digital rights management – the infamous Denuvo software, which has been cited by a few of the reviews that mention launch performance problems, with proprietary Symbiote software stacked on top. We interviewed a Denuvo executive last year about their reputation for tanking games.
This article has been updated to mention Civilization 6’s use of Red Shell tracking software.
