Once Human

Once Human is a free-to-play open-world survival shooter from Starry Studio, a NetEasePublisherNetEase GamesNetEase Games is the video-game division of NetEase, Inc., a Chinese internet company. It developed and publishes Marvel Rivals in collaboration with Marvel Games. NetEase ships its own in-house anti-cheat, a separate product from Tencent's ACE.3 games in this family → subsidiary, released July 9, 2024 on Windows, with mobile versions in 2025 and consoles announced for 2026. It is reported to run on NetEase's NeoXEngineNeoX (NetEase)NeoX is NetEase's proprietary in-house game engine, used across a range of the company's titles. Once Human is reported to run on NeoX, though an early preview described Unreal Engine 5; the public record does not cleanly reconcile the two.1 game in this family → engine. It launched strongly, peaking around 231,000 concurrent players on Steam and reaching the top of the seller charts in its first weeks, with a post-apocalyptic setting and a seasonal-server structure that resets progress on a cycle.

A privacy policy is a disclosure of what a company says it may collect and how it says it will use it. It is a description of permissions, not a measurement of what the software does on your machine in any given session, and broad collection language is common among large global publishers, written to cover many regions at once. That a policy permits collecting something is neither proof it does, nor a guarantee of restraint; both readings are fair, which is why the honest move is to read the actual terms rather than the loudest summary of them. For Once Human specifically, the reported mitigation was to install through Steam rather than the NetEase launcher, and the broader habit is the one that serves any game: decide what you are comfortable disclosing before you sign up, with the real policy in front of you.

Once Human's most discussed trust question at launch was not its anti-cheat but its privacy policy, and this plate treats it carefully. On the anti-cheat: the game ships one on PC, its Steam page carried a kernel-level anti-cheat notice at launch, and the specific product is not documented in named coverage, with community guesses ranging over NetEase's own system and Tencent's ACE, none confirmed. Players later reported the kernel-level notice was removed from the store page, with no outlet confirming what changed. So this guide describes the category, an anti-cheat is present, without naming a product it cannot verify. The more consequential ask was the data one, covered next.

At launch, NetEase's privacy policy for the game drew heavy backlash and review-bombing. What it actually said, quoted across outlets, is that the company may collect a long list including name, email, phone, messaging account, postal address, date of birth, age, gender, country, and government-issued ID such as passport information. Players called it spyware and worse, and pointed to the data going to a Chinese publisher. Three things are worth holding alongside that reaction. NetEase's stated response: government ID is collected only where local law requires it, or to verify a parent's consent, or to correct an age, and is deleted once that purpose is met, and the studio committed to improve how it describes its practices. Independent framing: a former Blizzard security figure publicly called the reaction overblown and said many large publishers carry similar language, which gaming press echoed. And a practical mitigation reported at the time: installing through Steam rather than the NetEase launcher. The claims that went further, about keystroke or biometric collection, were not found in the actual policy text by named press, so this guide does not repeat them. Sources include Kotaku, TheGamer, PCGamesN, GamesRadar, and Destructoid.