Terms of service

Who you are agreeing with#

GameDock is a registered business in Australia (ABN 32 410 811 454). These terms are an agreement between you and GameDock's founder, Adam Lang. Write to support@gamedock.co, use the contact form, or post to Office 4191, Ground Floor, 470 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne VIC 3004, Australia.

Your account#

You must be at least 16 to use GameDock, or older if the law where you live sets a higher age for using a service like this without a parent's consent. If you are under 18, you need a parent or guardian's permission, and by giving it they accept these terms on your behalf too. Only an adult can buy GameDock Plus; a parent or guardian can buy it for someone younger. An account found to belong to someone under the minimum age is closed and its data deleted.

GameDock is provided to you as-is, for personal, non-commercial use. You need a working email address; there is no password. You are responsible for the security of the email account you sign in with, because anyone who can read your email can sign in as you. You also choose a username, which is how the account is identified inside the product; it must not impersonate another person or GameDock itself, and one that does may be reclaimed.

You keep ownership of your data. By creating an account you agree that GameDock may use it, combined with other accounts' data and stripped of anything that identifies you, to produce anonymous statistics, and share or license those statistics as the privacy policy describes. Your account is included from the start; you can opt out at any time in Account › Privacy, and GameDock never shares a figure covering fewer than 50 accounts.

Paid plans and billing#

GameDock has a free plan and one paid plan, GameDock Plus. The free plan is not a trial and does not end. What each plan includes is set out on the pricing page, and the limits described there are the ones the product enforces.

• GameDock Plus is sold through Link, Stripe's checkout service, which acts as the seller (the merchant of record). When you subscribe you buy the subscription from Link, under Link's terms and privacy policy, which checkout shows before you pay, and GameDock provides it under these terms. Checkout and the billing portal are Stripe's own pages; card details go to Stripe and never reach GameDock.
• Prices are in US dollars and do not include tax. Because Link is the seller, Link works out any tax that applies where you are, shows it at checkout before you pay, and collects it and pays it to the tax authority. The amount checkout shows is the amount charged. If you buy as a business and give a tax number, Link applies the rules for business purchases in your country, which in some places means no tax is added.
• A subscription renews automatically each month or year until cancelled, at the price in force when it renews.
• You can cancel at any time from Account › Plan & billing, which opens Stripe's billing portal. Cancelling stops the next renewal and leaves Plus running until the period you have already paid for ends. There is no minimum term and no cancellation step that involves emailing anybody.
• If a renewal payment fails, Plus continues for up to fourteen days while Stripe retries the card, and you are emailed about it. If it is still unpaid after that, or Stripe stops retrying sooner, the account returns to the free plan.
• Returning to the free plan deletes nothing straight away. History beyond the free window is hidden, not removed, and resubscribing restores it. Physical copies and devices over a free limit are set aside for thirty days so you can resubscribe or choose which to keep; after that, the copies set aside are deleted and the extra devices unpaired. Save backup versions over the free limit are never deleted on a schedule: they make way one at a time as new backups arrive.
• A price change is announced before it takes effect and applies from the next renewal, never retrospectively to a period already paid for.

Refunds are not offered as a matter of course, because cancelling already stops the next charge and leaves you the period you paid for. That does not displace your statutory rights: nothing here excludes, restricts or modifies a consumer guarantee that cannot lawfully be excluded, including under the Australian Consumer Law. If something has gone wrong with a charge, email support@gamedock.co or use the contact form; any refund is issued through Link, as the seller, back to the card you paid with.

Connecting a platform account: read this one#

GameDock reads your stores in three ways. Your Steam library, playtime and achievements come from Steam's own Web API and, for a public profile, your Steam Community profile, using your Steam ID. PlayStation, Xbox, GOG and RetroAchievements are read by GameDock's servers on a schedule, with a sign-in token or key you hand over through the GameDock Companion extension, which GameDock keeps encrypted and deletes when you disconnect that store. And what those platforms publish no API for (what you actually paid, your full Steam licence list, your Epic orders, achievements on a private Steam profile), the Companion reads from your own signed-in browser session. That last route is the only way to see those things.

It also means GameDock is acting on your account, at your instruction. Those platforms' own terms govern what you may do with your account, and several of them restrict automated access in broad terms: Steam's Subscriber Agreement is the clearest example, and it permits Valve to restrict or terminate an account for it. Using GameDock could therefore put a platform account of yours at risk of limitation, suspension or termination by that platform.

• You connect a platform account at your own risk, and only accounts that are actually yours.
• You are responsible for complying with each platform's own terms.
• GameDock is not liable for any action a platform takes against your account, including loss of access to games or balances held there.
• You can disconnect any platform at any time from Settings › Sync, which revokes the credential immediately and will erase what that platform added if you choose that, and you can delete your whole account and everything in it from Account › Delete account.

This is stated up front rather than buried because it is a real trade: the capability is worth having, and you should get to decide that knowingly.

Your device and your own files#

GameDock Helper reads the folders you point it at on your own Linux device: installs, disk usage, save files and local achievement files. It reads what is already there and does not download, install, unlock or distribute any game or game content.

You are responsible for having the right to the content you point it at. GameDock does not verify how you obtained anything on your device, and showing a game in your library is not a statement that you are licensed to it.

Acceptable use#

• Do not use GameDock to access an account you do not own or are not authorised to use.
• Do not attempt to reach another account's data, or to probe, overload or disrupt the service.
• Do not resell, sublicense or provide GameDock to others as your own service.
• Do not use automated clients against GameDock's own endpoints outside the documented read-only API at /api/v1, and do not work around its rate limits or share a personal key.

Public content and moderation#

If you share your profile, reviews or lists, other people read what you wrote. Everything you share with other people (a display name, a bio, a username, a list and its notes, a review) must follow these rules:

• No harassment, threats or bullying, and nothing written to target a person.
• No hate speech or slurs, and nothing attacking people for who they are.
• No sexual content, and nothing sexual involving minors, ever.
• No spam, advertising or links placed to sell something.
• Do not pretend to be another person, a company, or GameDock and its staff.
• Mark reviews that give away the story as containing spoilers.
• Only post what you wrote, or have the right to post.

Anyone can report something that breaks these rules, signed in or not, from the Report button beside it; a person reads every report, and the account reported is not told who reported it. A moderator may hide a review or a list, mark a review as containing spoilers, remove a display name or bio, require a new username (the old one is then held for 90 days), suspend an account, or close an account that seriously or repeatedly breaks these terms, which deletes it exactly as Delete account would. The email address of a closed account cannot be used for a new one for two years, and a suspension stays with the email address if the account is deleted, so a new account made with it starts suspended. A suspended account is hidden from everyone else and cannot publish, like or report anything, but keeps its library, its export and the ability to delete itself. GameDock does not hide anything automatically because of how many reports it gets.

When a moderator acts on your account, you are emailed what was done and the reason. To appeal, or to ask for something to be taken down when you need a reply (a copyright or legal complaint, say), write to support@gamedock.co or use the contact form and choose "Someone's content, or a moderation decision"; a person looks at it again. You can also block an account from its profile, which hides each of you from the other wherever you are signed in.

The software itself#

GameDock, GameDock Helper and GameDock Companion are licensed to you for use, not sold. Except where applicable law says otherwise (including the interoperability rights many jurisdictions grant and which these terms do not attempt to exclude), you may not decompile or reverse engineer them in order to build a competing or substantially similar product, and you may not redistribute a modified build as though it were GameDock.

No affiliation#

GameDock is an independent product. It is not endorsed by, affiliated with, or sponsored by Valve, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Microsoft, GOG, Epic Games, RetroAchievements, Nintendo, or any other platform it reads. Their names and marks are used only to identify the platform an account is connected to.

Availability and change#

GameDock depends on platforms it does not control. Any of them can change, break or block an integration without notice, and features can stop working as a result. The service is provided without a guarantee of availability, and a feature may be changed or withdrawn.

No warranty, and what we are liable for#

GameDock is provided "as is", without warranties of any kind, to the extent the law allows. It shows you information about money you have spent; it is not financial advice or an authoritative record, and you should not rely on it for tax or accounting. Nothing in these terms excludes a right or guarantee that cannot lawfully be excluded, including under the Australian Consumer Law.

Ending it#

You can cancel a paid plan yourself from Account › Plan & billing, and delete the account itself from Account › Delete account, which also cancels any subscription immediately and does not refund the remainder of a period already paid for. GameDock may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms. If an account is closed while a paid period is running because of something its holder was not responsible for, such as someone else misusing it, the unused part of that period is refunded. If the service shuts down, reasonable notice will be given so you can get your data out, and any paid period still running is refunded pro rata.

Governing law#

These terms are governed by the laws of Victoria, Australia. Questions: support@gamedock.co, or the contact form.