Once Human has been one the year’s more highly-anticipated survival games. After enjoying several successful beta tests, it coasted on a lot of enthusiasm from the community, which culminated with even more positive buzz from the Steam Next Fest demo, where more players got their hands on it. The free-to-play survival shooter has now officially launched, and though it did run into the all-too-common launch day issues, players are mostly upset with something that has little to do with the game itself.
The EULA of Once Human contains a few terms many players took issue with. The game is developed by Starry Studio, a team within Chinese publishing giant NetEase - which also published the game. As spotted by GamesRadar , the game’s privacy policy seems to be a little too far-reaching, compared to those found in most games.
You have the regular notes about data collection, both for gameplay reasons, as well as other data to be used for marketing. As players quickly discovered, however, some of that includes more sensitive user data, such as geolocation, and could even extend to government-issued IDs. What many players also found alarming was how NetEase may rely on “other sources” to collect said data, meaning the information doesn’t strictly come from playing the game.
As many of the game’s negative reviews on Steam point out, the fact NetEase is able to collect user data outside the game (such as social media accounts) could allow it to build more robust profiles of .
