if you agree the terms don’t show any evidence of spyware or excessive data collection why quote this article specifically in the first place?

i had paraphased the article and didn’t think to quote it until after i had posted…also did not realize that you can edit post titles until just now. fixed it to make it more clear that i am quoting… maybe?

what is is the “shit like in this article” we’re talking about?

even if it is not actual spyware, my undesrtanding is they have still changed tos to make data collection more negative towards the player and not in any apparent opt-out-able way.

unless i mistunderstood, i agree with the people that are upset that they information is more likely to be harvested. i dont agree with calling it “spyware” just bc some tos were changed and made more anti-consumer, if thats whats going on.

but i dont know for sure. i suspect its “only” legal crap that has changed to become more anti-consumer and that article writers / people in steam reviewers are using the term “spyware” wrong… but i don’t actually know. afaik, could be a tos change and some kind of software change too. so im still keeping term “spyware”… sorry for the confusion. hope that clears it up?

I’m not sure how [split-screen] makes pirating the game more or less justifiable, though

sorry for the confusion. you’re not wrong but i kinda explained it badly too

• a game having split-screen or not across the board (console/pc)? you’re right, that has nothing to do with it.
• a console-to-pc port that had already implemented split-screen on console but dropped it for the pc verson? is that 100% going to make me pirate it? nah but companys that try and force pc users to only do online co-op or even just ones that assume nobody on pc wants co-op still pisses me off and the more po’ed i am the less likely to support the company w a real purchsae. every person that buys into that just encourages the bad design decision
• a solid game that has split-screen and no company shenanigans? i might pirate to test out and confirm i liek the design, but ultimately will probably spend money bc i want to support the devs so they keep making good games.

thanks man will check it out

fucking hate shareholders and wallstreet. wish we could just go back to individuals who were just greedy and privately owned a company… yea, they were still scum but as long as they got their cut they didnt usually insist on bleeding you of every last penny

agreed. that’s why I put it in quotes in the post body. “spyware” is what the article said tho

i only skimmed the article after randomly seeing some negative reviews on steam (was looking at something else and noticed one of the games had “recent reviews: mostly negative” so i got curious). but kinda thinking from the wording that they’ll just collect your data from the sales info.

for my part, i dn’t plan on giving shitty greedcorps like this a penny, even if it means skipping the title completely (not really interested in BL for SP tbh). i already try to support games that do a legit good job of split-screen co-op with a legit purcahse but seems like very very few games actually add split-screen anymore and a lot of games that have it, either aren’t ported to pc or they drop the feature when it gets ported (e.g. xbox/ps game has offlien co-op but pc version is online co-op only).

i swear, if they would quit fucking around and making pc versions shittier than the console ones and quit doing shit like in this article, i probably wouldn’t even bother pirate games anymore. then again, have also been suckered in with “looks good but isnt’” shit before too, so free “trials” are nice, even if you do a legit buy in the end. but this kinda thing makes me think, if some companies do this crap, then i dont even bother with legit purchases for them ever.

edit: wrote this shortly after i got up and probably explained it bad. see comment below for clarification on last part