Gearbox finally responds to series-wide Borderlands review bomb after 19 days, says its owner "does not use spyware" and it's actually OK with most mods

The Borderlands series has been suffering a massive, series-wide review-bomb for nearly three weeks now, and developer Gearbox has finally addressed it.

Over the past 19 days, beginning on May 19, the entire Borderlands series has been blasted on Steam. According to its recent reviews, the most popular game in the series is Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, with 29% positive reviews. That lack of popularity runs through every numbered entry, down to 2014's Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, which has just 9% positive reviews.

The culprit is the new Borderlands user agreement, which players quickly blasted as 'spyware' for reports that it granted high-level access to your machine under the guise of anti-cheat software. Some members of the community have stood up to suggest that that's not really the case, and that Gearbox and its publisher and parent company have all been quite chill about modding and the like, but it's not done much to improve the review scores.

Now, 19 days after the first drops of that review-bomb downpour started to fall, Gearbox has issued its response. In a post on Steam, it said that "we know there have been some concerns from Borderlands fans about Take-Two's Terms of Service." Desiring to address some of those concerns, Gearbox kicked off with the eminently reassuring "Take-Two does not use spyware."

It says it asks for permission to collect some data, but that doesn't mean it's actually doing it on every game or service. Where it does collect, Take-Two is trying to "personalize the user experience," not take a digital peek at its players.

Secondly, the company addresses anti-cheat concerns, saying that what it actually wants to ban are "mods that allow users to gain an unfair advantage," to "protect the integrity of the game experience." Generally, it argues, Take-Two "does not seek to take action against mods that are single-player only, non-commercial, and respect the IP rights of its labels."

Whether that does enough to assuage the fears of players, I'm not convinced. Somehow I doubt it, especially since Gearbox snuck this whole thing out while all eyes were elsewhere thanks to Summer Game Fest. Given that it's also tried dropping steep discounts and full giveaways on some of these games, however, clearly it knows it needs to do something a little different. But even if that does work, it's still got to compete against the Twitter account of Borderlands boss Randy Pitchford, which is probably doing about as much damage as the EULA.

Borderlands 4 boss Randy Pitchford wants to know what makes a game bigger or better, and he's using Borderlands 2 and 3 to find out