What's going on with Borderlands 2? Steam is giving it for free, but the game has 23% positive recent reviews.

If a game, application, device or EULA changes in a way you find unacceptable, after you've purchased it, you should be able to get your initial purchase price back. And if you paid with your data, you need to be able to demand they delete all your data. I think that law would be entirely reasonable and would do a lot of good.

They added spyware to it.

Here is excerpt from the tos, shared by user in steam reviews of the game.

important Info in Terms of Service:

• Mods are a bannable offense • Display of Cheats/Exploits is bannable • Forced arbitration clause and a waiver of class action and jury trial rights for all users residing in the United States and any other territory other than Australia, Switzerland, The United Kingdom, or The Territories of The European Economic Area • You can be banned for using a VPN while connecting to online servers • Cannot access game content on a Virtual PC

Collected Data Types: • Identifiers / Contact Information: Name, user name, gamertag, postal and email address, phone number, unique IDs, mobile device ID, platform ID, gaming service ID, advertising ID (IDFA, Android ID) and IP address • Protected Characteristics: Age and gender • Commercial Information: Purchase and usage history and preferences, including gameplay information • Billing Information: Payment information (credit / debit card information) and shipping address • Internet / Electronic Activity: Web / app browsing and gameplay information related to the Services; information about your online interaction(s) with the Services or our advertising; and details about the games and platforms you use and other information related to installed applications • Device and Usage Data: Device type, software and hardware details, language settings, browser type and version, operating system, and information about how users use and interact with the Services (e.g., content viewed, pages visited, clicks, scrolls) • Profile Inferences: Inferences made from your information and web activity to help create a personalized profile so we can identify goods and services that may be of interest • Audio / Visual Information: Account photos, images, and avatars, audio information via chat features and functionality, and gameplay recordings and video footage (such as when you participate in playtesting) • Sensitive Information: Precise location information (if you allow the Services to collect your location), account credentials (user name and password), and contents of communications via chat features and functionality.

I wouldnt touch anything this company has produced.

LOL. I loved the Borderlands franchise, until Epic made their evil dog shit app store and the Borderlands devs sold out to them. Motherfuck Borderlands forever now. Thanks for the warning so I don't accidentally reinstall any of it from Steam.

I sometimes wonder what will happen when EAC, that has root access to millions of PCs, gets compromised or has grunty employee and pushes malicious update

I just don't understand anticheat or copy protection on PvE games. I can understand it if you don't want to play against a cheater, but this is a cooperative shooter.

Ok so that explains the bad reviews, but why is steam giving the game away for free? Also BL3 is heavily discounted

🏴‍☠️ is free and without shenanigans.

You literally posted the answer to your question. Here is an expansion of the details.

Did the EULA change? ✅
Were all Take Two games automatically updated in secret and now hijack your machine with root access to spy on everything you do? ❌
Do Take Two games contain code to report telemetry and user information(including application/system activity) to a home server? ✅
Is this EULA change extraordinary and particularly egregious in comparison to others that most people have probably already agreed to? ❌(IMO)
Are people riled up because e a YouTube video went a little viral and now they’re all playing telephone to the point where it’s now gotten to the point of random dumdums are review booming a 13 year old game claiming it’s turned into literal spyware? ✅(again, IMO)
Should you be surprised by any of this if you’ve been even remotely paying attention for any period of the last 30-40 years? ❌
Do we need more than just angry idiots in the battle against corpatocracy? ✅

We should be done coddling the late comers at this point. Yes welcome them and accept them, but at a certain point your level of ignorance became a detriment to your community and you should be made aware of that fact.

lemmy yet again falls for the ragebait hook line and sinker

Doesn’t the screenshot you posted explain what’s going on?

I apparently love downvotes but here goes: All the Borderlands games (annoying childish cell-shaded skinner-box) and everything Gearbox is and has ever created it utter shit. The CEO is a garbage person, and thier dealings with Epic is Capitalist-Oink-Piggy shite! ""FUCK YOU 2K & GEARBOX, AND FUCK YOU BORDERLANDS!"

That. The content of the screenshot you posted. That is what's going on.

Pirates are winning over my empathy.

Is this because Embracer sold Borderlands to Take-Two last year?

Y'all really going to freak out over the new paralegal being told to update the EULAs and lazily hitting the update all button?

A government that cares for is people would ban this shit and procecute any company trying to find ways around it.

I checked the Steam depots. It seems the game files haven’t been updated since 2022. All that seems to have changed is some license agreement in February. Seems to be a thing across take two games, and not specific to borderlands 2.

Basically nothing has changed in real terms for this game. Maybe borderlands 4 might have draconian DRM, who knows.

So 50% score loss because of a permissive EULA, got it ...

I'll just leave this in the "Pitchforks against Pitchford" and "Woke, must hate" folder. Call me back when they do actually include a rootkit in their games instead of jumping the gun because loud feelings say loud things. If only there was some way to get statistics of the people getting outraged because of posts in a subreddit community and the people who don't have a problem with rootkits installed by their favorite MMOs...

I didn't enjoy the Handsome Collection but free is free. Thanks for sharing.

I only play AAA games on GeForce Now (cloud). If the game can't run on my Linux system or on the cloud, I ain't touching it. Also, there are so many wonderful games that do not require a colonoscopy into your personal data to be played.

the game's store page doesn't mention that it requires root access, like it does for some other games. am i missing something?

edit: the words "root" and "level" (ctrl+f'd each one separately) don't appear anywhere in the EULA. "access" shows up in a couple spots that definitely are NOT talking about root level access. i'm all about outrage over enshittification, but so far this sounds like bullshit

I'm assuming the post is actually about DRM operating at ring 0. That's not really root level though. That's kernel level. Root is still operating in user-mode and politely asking the kernel to interact with hardware.

I noticed too.

Is the EULA also applicable to the Linux version, assuming that Aspyr did actually port the game to Linux and not just use Wine or something?

On one side of the ring, greedy corps which want to profile you better than the NSA does. On the other, drama-hungry and social networks-fueled outrage culture.

That's how an old game giveaway backfires and becomes the scandal of the day.

Why isnt Steam banning them? Munny?

I’ll just stick to playing my console copy