One time my buddy was tripping super hard and he went to play a new game, stared at the TOS for like 5-10 mins then hit “do not accept” and backed out to the home screen.
I’ll never forget that.
I have purchased games, have it ask for me to create an account, and promptly never play the game. What’s annoying is a lot of sports games are like this now.
I bought NBA 2k since I hadn’t played a basketball game since NBA Live 2001. It took like 15 minutes to get a account set up. A few days later my account was gone. Haven’t played since.
Temp email+fake PII is my go to when this happens. I really appreciated Larian letting me skip straight to the game with BG3. Stuff like this should always be optional.
I wasn’t even happy with Larian, their data collection is on by default.
The whole account and telemetry is completely unnecessary.
I just want a game. No accounts. No external features. No DLC. No microtransactions. No telemetry collection.
Just a game. It doesn’t seem like much to ask.
It SHOULD be optional but corporate greed wants your data. Just Cause 3 is still sitting unplayed on my Steam account for this exact reason and I fucking loved Just Cause 1 and 2
Bane of my existence. These game companies lock in and I bet my left pinky toe cuticle they sell our data too -_-
I’d wager selling your data as an additional income stream is one of the primary reasons some studios do it in the first place.
This is why a lot of sites demand an account log in if the user disables cookies (or at least they did for a while). They need those cookies to link the activity to a user, and since they can’t do that secretly anymore, they just force the issue with a user account the user “chooses” to make.
I’ve seen sites straight up need money to deny cookies, yeah no im just leaving your site whatevers on there isn’t worth
Just don’t enter any real info, and use a spam email address.
What are they going to do? Check?
Loads of companies think I’m from Zimbabwe
Thats a steam refund
literally every app on windows/macos
I use simplelogin and all my accounts belong to a John Doe
I game only on the PC and favor buying games from GOG over Steam, partly since one of the former’s core selling points is no-DRM (also you can directly download the games with no need for using GOG Galaxy and play offline for ever and ever), so I’ll just check the user reviews before buying and if there is some kind of mandatory account creation somebody will have complained and I will simply not buy that game (tends to be a pretty aware crowd on those subjects over there).
I’m reading here of people buying it and then not playing the game because of this and thinking: people doing that makes the decision to add this kind of thing a can’t-lose for the game makers - either way they get paid for the game and the with most people they do some extra money by selli gbtheir private information whilst for other the don’t but they still got a game sale, same as if they had not added this crap.
Best to check a few user reviews before buying and denying them a purchase if they’ve added such crap to the game, IMHO, as that changes the ROI equation and can make it a net negative to have this in a game.
This isn’t really that much of an issue… As others have said, if you don’t want to give your details just use fake info.
People sometimes seem to give up if they hit any resistance at all to their actions.
I’d rather just refund it, fuck rewarding a dev team that resorts to this.
I honestly don’t get it. It’s such an extremist view for something that’s insignificant.
You paid for a game you’re excited for, and then because you have to sign up for 30 seconds you’d rather get upset, and then spend a longer amount of time refunding the game?
Maybe people here are being hyperbolic but I honestly can’t see people refunding the game because of this.
I’ve never experienced this, ever.
Have you not bought a game since the early 80s?
That’s a bit too far back. Just a bit.