Borderlands 2 is free to keep on Steam until June 8, and if you think people are happy about that, well sir, you are wrong. They are in fact madder than hell, and they are expressing their displeasure in the time-honored way of gamers: With a good old-fashioned review bombing.
Borderlands 2 is an older game, having come out in 2012, but it’s also widely regarded as the best game in the series. We gave it a 90% score in our review, calling it a “satisfying and tactically interesting shooter, with great missions and excitingly random guns.”
Right now it’s totally free, for keeps as I mentioned, and it’s on Steam, the online store that people actually like. So what could possibly be the issue?
Because there is definitely an issue.
It’s not, as you might reasonably think, because people are mad about something Randy Pitchford said—although I suppose that might actually be it for some people. The big problem, though, is that Take-Two recently changed its EULA, which numerous negative Steam reviews claim turn its games into “spyware.”
This is actually not a new phenomenon. As we reported in May, it all seemingly started in March when a Borderlands YouTuber by the name of Hellfire posted a video entitled “Take-Two Spies on Borderlands Players,” highlighting policy changes made by Take-Two earlier in the year. The video turns on two primary complaints: That Take-Two collects personal information like name, username, phone number, IP address, and operating system, and a clause that some say could be used to ban mods or the people who use them.
In the wake of that and subsequent videos, which drove even more strident claims about Take-Two’s underhanded intentions, review bombs fell across the entire Borderlands series on Steam. Eventually it subsided, as these things do, but it flared up again with Borderlands 2 going free: 738 negative reviews have been posted so far today alone, which is a lot for a 13-year-old videogame.
So that’s where it stands: Borderlands 2 is free on Steam and that’s triggered a round of review bombing for unrelated reasons that have dragged the recent user rating down to “mostly negative,” and if you think that’s odd for such a highly-regarded shooter, well, now you know why. Grab it while you can.
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