After Human developer Starry Studios responded to player privacy concerns, many of the survival game’s anticipated “Mixed” Steam reviews focused on its aggressive End User License Agreement (EULA).
Once Human is published by Chinese giant NetEase and collects personal information from players under the publisher’s privacy policy. The list of collected data is quite long – in addition to gameplay-relevant information such as your name, contact details, marketing preferences, and gameplay details, all of which are collected through the game itself, NetEase also collects information “through your use of our services or from other sources.”
It’s that part that seems to be the most concerning. In many cases, NetEase is trying to collect information that is not significantly different from that of many other game publishers – things like name and contact details, marketing and communications data, social media accounts, game accounts such as Steam or PSN logins. There are also parts of Privacy Policy dedicated to collecting aliases and social media accounts and geolocation information. In certain U.S. states, NetEase may also collect information such as postal address, physical characteristics or description, protected characteristics such as race or gender, browsing history, occupation, and ethnic origin as inferred from profile pictures or avatars.
Several negative reviews of Once Human mention the game’s privacy policy, EULA, or other terms of service. While there are concerns about the lack of servers or characters (the latter of which has already been addressed by developers), a significant portion of players who give Once Human a bad review do so based on the personal data it collects, with many of them having only played the game for a very short time.
In response, the game’s developers released a statement on their official Discord server (via Steam). That statement reads: “NetEase takes the privacy of user data very seriously and adheres to the principles of data privacy, such as data minimization, purpose limitation, and transparency.” It points out the issue of government-issued IDs and says that it would only collect that data “where local laws require us to do so, [….] when the identity of a user’s parent must be verified to obtain consent for their child, […] or when the user wishes to correct his/her age information.” If such data is collected, NetEase will delete it immediately after the purpose for which the information was collected has been achieved.
Starry Studios also points out that NetEase explained to players “how [they] can practice [their] rights to manage [their] personal information”, via in-game customer service. The privacy policy has also been revised recently, with the new version “coming soon”. However, the developer says that “we’ve heard your concerns and will continue to improve how we describe our data privacy practices”. That probably won’t change much in the short term – NetEase is a publishing giant with its influence felt in all sorts of games around the world – but it could go some way to stem the tide of negative reviews. Once Human seems to be off to a decent start, peaking at 80,000 players, but “mixed” sentiment on Steam could spell very bad news for a game so early in its lifespan.
Hours before launch, critically acclaimed survival game Once Human is reminding players about seasonal server wipes “to provide a fairer, more relaxed, and freer gaming experience.”