Gearbox responds to worries about Borderlands 4’s terms of service: ‘Take-Two does not use spyware in its games’

Borderlands 4 got off to a rough start on Steam today, mostly because of performance and crash problems—you can read more about that in Nick Evanson’s heroic launch-day performance report. As I write this, there’s been no official response from Gearbox about the game’s technical issues, but it has put out a statement on another complaint that’s cropped up, much more rarely but still visible here and there in negative user reviews: Borderlands 4’s terms of service.

You may recall that previous Borderlands games on Steam were review-bombed earlier this year because of changes in their EULAs. There were also claims that Take-Two, the parent of Borderlands developer Gearbox, had made the changes because it intended to implement kernel-level anti-cheat in Borderlands 4, which it would then use to gain personal information from its players.

It was all a bit (or a lot) overblown, as PC Gamer’s Tyler Colp pointed out: “a misleading YouTube video prompting fans to play a game of telephone about the changes to the EULA over Reddit and forum threads, and a bout of short-lived Steam review bombing that hasn’t accomplished much of anything.”

Those review bombings did indeed have little impact, in part because games like Borderlands 2 and 3 have thousands of pre-existing positive reviews, which makes it tough to move the overall needle. Borderlands 4 doesn’t have that buffer, though, and perhaps anticipating trouble, Gearbox has put out a statement addressing concerns about the Borderlands 4 TOS.

“Take-Two does not use spyware in its games,” Gearbox wrote in no uncertain terms. “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.”

Gearbox said Take-Two lists this stuff in its TOS “to provide transparency to players and comply with its legal obligations,” and that it collects the information “to deliver its services to players, including to protect the game environment and player experience.” That includes things like ensuring compatibility and offering personalization options, such as username displays.

The statement also addresses worries that the updated TOS will give Take-Two the right to crack down on modders, saying that it prohibits “abusive mods” but “does not seek to take action against mods that are single-player only, non-commercial, and respect the intellectual property (IP) rights of its labels and third parties.”

The statement is virtually identical to one posted in the discussion forums for older Borderlands games (Borderlands 3, for instance) in June, which is fair enough because there’s really nothing to change.

And while Tyler correctly noted in his May report that we really should pay attention to what we’re agreeing to when we click the button so we can get on with playing, in this case it seems there really is very little to worry about: If you’ve signed up for a Shift account so you can redeem Borderlands codes—or, really, engaged in virtually any other transaction on the internet—you’ve already handed over all the information anyway. Maybe that’s not great, but it’s the world we’ve built.