Terms & Conditions

A Terms & Conditions agreement dictates the rules, restrictions, obligations, and responsibilities while playing your game.

A Terms & Conditions agreement can include:

1. Standards of behavior if your game allows for users to interact with other users.
2. Payment terms if you charge for the game.
3. Liability disclaimers that may arise from playing your game.

Examples of the above:

  • Fingersoft, a game developer in Finland, combines licensing terms and rules of use into a Terms of Service/End User License Agreement hybrid.
  • Take2Games provides one Terms & Conditions that applies to all of its games.
  • Niantic Labs, known for their augmented reality games, creates separate Terms & Conditions agreements for each game. Pokemon Go has a different agreement than Ingress, even though they are both produced by Niantic Labs.

Whether you maintain a general Terms & Conditions agreement or separate agreements for different games depends on how different your games are from one another.

For example, if one of your games is made only for adults over 18 but another one targets children under 13, you’re likely better off writing separate Terms & Conditions agreements.

However, if the differences between your games are very subtle, e.g. one game is a subscription service and the other is free with in-app purchases, you can cover both in one Terms & Conditions agreement.

Clauses for Games Terms & Conditions

The following clauses are not unique from other types of Terms & Conditions agreements but they are important to the success of your game. Without these provisions in your agreement, you could be exposing your business to unnecessary liability.

Acceptance of Your Terms

The Terms & Conditions for your game won’t help your business much if there’s no way to assure acceptance of its terms.
Browsewrap and clickwrap are common ways of assuring acceptance but you can also dictate the terms of acceptance in your agreement.

Allowed Uses & Restrictions

Many Terms & Conditions agreements of games focus more on restrictions of users rather than what they are allowed to do. That’s likely due to the fact that restrictions do more to control liability and give game developers more leeway when they need to cancel or suspend an account. However, both should be included for the most clarity.

Account Suspension/Termination

You want to address two issues in an “Account termination” section of your Terms & Conditions agreement for the game: One, what can lead to account suspension or termination and two, that you have the right to take this action. It’s best to address both at once.

Privacy

You want to address two issues in an “Account termination” section of your Terms & Conditions agreement for the game: One, what can lead to account suspension or termination and two, that you have the right to take this action. It’s best to address both at oncThe Terms & Conditions agreement is not required to contain privacy provisions and if it does, the provisions serve as a brief summary of the separate Privacy Policy agreement.

Liability and Warranty Disclaimers

You should have a mixture of specific liability disclaimers and general ones in your Terms & Conditions. These clauses work to protect you legally from any damages, faulty products or other issues with your game that may have people wanting to bring a lawsuit against you.
The Pokemon GO game attracts liability because people can injure themselves while paying too much attention to the game and not enough to where they are going. Trespass was also an issue at the height of the game’s popularity.
The Terms & Conditions of the game addresses this specific issue:
Even if you don’t believe there’s any liability associated with your game, you should include these kind of disclaimers anyway.

Third Parties

Include a clause that addresses third party content, letting users know that you are not responsible for anything related to that third party.
In its Terms & Conditions agreement from Roblox, the “Third Party Materials” is not responsible for objectionable material and doesn’t guarantee that services from third parties are appropriate

Contact Information

As a measure of good faith, end your Terms & Conditions agreement with your business contact information.If you have a specific department for addressing Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy questions, give users the contact information for this department.