Once Human is one of the most anticipated survival games this year. After several successful beta tests, it received great enthusiasm from the community and received even more positive responses during the Steam Next Fest demo, giving more players the opportunity to experience the game.
The free-to-play survival shooter is now officially out, and while it has certainly had its fair share of launch-day issues, players are most unhappy with things that have nothing to do with the game itself.
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Once Human’s EULA contains some clauses that have caused dissatisfaction among many players. The game was developed by Starry Studio, a team affiliated with Chinese publishing giant NetEase, which also published the game.
GamesRadar found that the game’s privacy policy seemed a bit too broad compared to most games, with the game regularly logging data collection, both on gameplay and other data used for marketing.
However, players soon discovered that some of this data included more sensitive user data, such as geolocation and potentially even government-issued IDs. Many players were also shocked that NetEase might rely on “other sources” to collect the aforementioned data, meaning that this information was not strictly derived from playing the game.
As many of the negative reviews of the game on Steam point out, NetEase is able to collect user data outside of the game (such as social media accounts), which allows it to build a more complete profile of each player. This data could then potentially be sold to advertisers; not to mention the ethical and privacy issues.
In fact, most of Once Human’s negative reviews come from players who have spent little time playing the game, choosing only to post reviews to draw attention to this issue. Of course, some reviews talk about more gameplay-related issues, such as server stability and character restrictions. The criticism was so loud that the developer released a statement on the game’s official Discord server to address the issues, specifically clarifying government ID numbers and explaining that this information would not be saved on NetEase’s servers.
“NetEase takes users’ data privacy very seriously and adheres to data privacy principles such as data minimization, purpose limitation, and transparency,” the developer wrote (paraphrased from the Steam forums ).
“For example, we will only collect government-issued IDs when local law requires us to do so (such as for certain promotions), when the identity of a user’s parents must be verified to obtain consent from their children (if required by applicable child protection laws), or when a user wishes to correct their age information (again, if such verification is required by law). In any case, the ID information will be deleted immediately after we have completed the purpose for which it was collected.”
For a survival game, this one hasn’t had the smoothest launch. Despite quickly approaching 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, the mixed reviews clearly aren’t the best. However, all of this may not matter to fans of survival games.
