Congrats on Buying Subnautica 2 — You're Already the Product
Subnautica 2 shattered Steam Early Access records by selling two million copies and reaching 460,000 peak concurrent users within its first 12 hours on sale, yet this milestone was almost immediately eclipsed by the discovery that four separate telemetry pipelines were actively transmitting player data before users had ever been shown the EULA consent screen. Before a single "I Agree" button was clicked, the game had automatically generated a Krafton account, an Epic Online Services session, a device hardware fingerprint, and a Sentry error-tracking session — conduct that privacy regulators argue lacks any lawful basis under GDPR Article 6. The EULA itself compounded the problem with a cascade of aggressively one-sided provisions: a $50 maximum damages cap that renders the publisher functionally immune from accountability, a license termination clause triggered by VPN use, a "reputational harm" termination clause designed to suppress public criticism, and a flat prohibition on class-action lawsuits. Publisher Krafton carries serious pre-existing credibility deficits, having allegedly engineered layoffs to evade a $250 million bonus obligation owed to Unknown Worlds developers, then reportedly deployed a ChatGPT-generated legal strategy to defend that decision — a gambit that ended in a court defeat and the revocation of Krafton's Steam publisher status entirely. EU consumers have launched formal GDPR complaints, and the forthcoming EU Digital Fairness Act (Q4 2026) positions this incident as a potential regulatory inflection point for the gaming industry's longstanding covert surveillance practices.