Borderlands 2, one of the highest-rated and best-selling games of all time, is getting review bombed on Steam almost 13 years after its original release. And when it’s being given away for free, no less.
Currently, it’s a free pickup on Steam until June 8, 2025, but players are coming back to the Steam page just to give it negative reviews even if they’ve got hundreds of hours in the game.
However, no new content has been added. The last update was years ago, right before Borderlands 3 came out. So, what’s happening here?
Due to some changes in Take-Two’s End User License Agreement in regards to how much information they can collect from players, people are rebelling en masse to show their displeasure with them now having their information collected. However, all of this panic may have been over nothing.
Is Borderlands 2 spyware? EULA change explained
What exactly changed in the EULA that has players so mad? Well, Take-Two’s updated agreement applies retroactively to all their games, and has clauses about banning players who implement mods and cheats (something co-op parties often do in BL2), as well as the ways in which your information is collected and used.
This has resulted in mass backlash, with almost 5000 recent negative reviews on Steam at the time of writing.
However, Take-Two’s EULA is fairly standard in games industry terms, and the agreement lays out plainly what users’ information is used for:
- Business Purposes: Provide the Services and support; fulfill orders and requests; improve the Services and our business; develop new products and services; enhance your experience on the Services; protect the security for our users, employees, facilities, and Services; and develop internal marketing and demographic studies.
- Commercial Purposes: Market and advertise our and our business partners’ products and services; send you promotional materials; and administer promotional activities or events.
- We also use your information as permitted by law.
This is what the vast majority of companies have outlined in their own EULAs, with the use of user information being fairly standardized in the industry and beyond. For instance, most web browsers have a very similar function, which is how things like AdSense work to send you ads for products you may be interested in.
Additionally, Borderlands 2 has no form of anti-cheat or any built-in rules about whether or not you can modify the game or use Cheat Engine and other software to alter it. Even if users could get banned over it, there’s no way for the game to detect it.
Gearbox SoftwareWhile this may mean that Borderlands 4 ends up having some sort of anti-cheat and may bar users from using mods in that title, that doesn’t retroactively apply to Borderlands 2 because of these changes.
So, despite Steam review bombing, it’s safe to say that Borderlands 2 isn’t spyware. If it, or any other Take-Two games for that matter, were used in that way due to this universal EULA change for several of their titles, they’d have been removed from Steam almost immediately as that’s against the platform’s TOS and also generally illegal.
