In response to the alarming claims that several of Take-Two’s games, including the recently released Borderlands 4 use spyware, developer Gearbox has issued an official statement on behalf of the publisher:
“Take-Two does not use spyware in its games,” the statement reads. “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 affirmed that Take-Two provides this information for maintaining “transparency to players” along with complying with “its legal obligations.”
“For example, player and device identifiers are collected in part to ensure the game is compatible with each player’s media, platform or website browser type,” it continued. “It allows us to better understand how players play games, and to personalize the user experience (like having usernames show up!). Account credentials are collected from users who choose to create accounts with Take-Two and its labels.”
Also according to the studio, Take-Two’s terms of service actually “prohibit mods that allow users to gain an unfair advantage, negatively impact the ability of other users to enjoy the game as intended, or allow users to gain access to content that the user is not entitled to. We do this to protect the integrity of the game experience for all users. Take-Two generally 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.”
Borderlands 4 is currently at a ‘mixed’ review rating on Steam cause of numerous performance issues and technical problems. The general complaints from players are centered around the game’s unexpectedly low performance even on high-end PCs with reports of crashes that are stopping the game from even starting up.
While Gearbox has provided a detailed NVIDIA Optimization Guide and has showed an optimal settings chart pointing out the graphics settings that could work best depending on your combination of Graphics card and targeted display resolution, it’s unlikely that the game’s performance issues can be addressed solely by those suggestions.
