Once Human, a new post-apocalyptic free-to-play game, is being review-bombed by concerned players over what they perceive to be an overly invasive privacy policy, prompting a response from publisher NetEase.
A quick look at the game's Steam review page shows an abundance of negative reviews, many of them pointing to the game's privacy policy (although some are simply criticizing the game's mechanics and content).
One user describes what they see as the "over-collection of personal information" and "security risks", while another says they "nope[d] the hell out and exited" after reading Once Human's terms of service.
In a new FAQ on the official Once Human website, publisher NetEase responds to players' concerns by describing how it uses the data it collects and attempting to allay fears regarding the collection of unnecessary information.
NetEase says it "only collect[s] and use[s] personal data according to specific purposes". For instance, the studio says it would only "collect government-issued IDs" if local laws required it to, pointing to prize distribution, the need to identify a user's parent for consent, or if a user "wishes to correct their age information".
The publisher also clarifies that the "Chinese named program" running in the background of Once Human is a WebView Helper, which "supports WebView page rendering" within the game.
Lastly, NetEase says that it's not necessary to download the NetEase Launcher if you're playing Once Human on Steam or the Epic Store, although it is needed if you've downloaded the game through NetEase's official website.
Whether or not NetEase's assurances do anything to allay users' fears about privacy remains to be seen, but it's not the only weirdness surrounding Once Human right now.
Yesterday, just before Once Human's launch, NetEase revealed that players would only be able to create a single character per account at launch, with multi-character creation support arriving sometime in August.
However, after players criticized this decision, NetEase almost immediately reversed it, announcing yesterday that multi-character creation was now possible.
I'm not entirely sure why NetEase decided to restrict character creation in the first place. In the aforementioned FAQ, the studio says this decision was made "due to technical issues", but the fact that it was so easy to reverse casts an uneasy light on the whole matter.
In any case, Once Human is available to play right now for free on PC and mobile devices, assuming that you can stomach its privacy policy.
