Hello and welcome to all Great Dealers out there!
Today we’d like to spend a word on Dealer’s Life privacy policy.
We know that reading privacy policies is boring (believe us, it’s the same for us when having to write them!) and we also know that sometimes they can seem “scary” as they are not written in an “ordinary” language (some companies even exploit this thing). The two things combined may trigger fears for your personal information.
If you want to know more, the first advice regarding our privacy policy is to read it carefully and till the end, you should not stop at the first line and then start fearing for the worst because there is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in our policy.
To prove this point we just updated it and made it clearer, especially for PC users as we have less active services on the PC versions of our games.
And to be even clearer, we will summarize here all the services we use in our games!
Firebase Remote Config
This is our remote configuration provider, it lets us dynamically set in-game parameters without having to modify it (i.e.: we don’t have to release an updated build).
We use it to trigger “Holiday Themes” (soon the Easter Theme will be activated!), to show in the main menu the “new version available” animation and to show on mobiles a special animation in Dealer’s Life Lite if the Premium version is on sale. We also have more ideas on this topic for the future, as this really helps setting events and special situations.
🎵 Last Christmas, I gave you my Pixelated Pickaxe
but the very next day you gave it away 🎵
Firebase Remote Config uses various types of Data as specified in Google privacy policy.
AdMob by Google (Mobile users only)
This is our ads provider, we need it to show ads on our mobile games and let you try Dealer’s Life Lite for free.
Google Admob uses cookies and unique device identifiers for advertising (Google Advertiser ID or IDFA, for example).
As per GDPR this is considered a “personal information” and this usage must be disclosed. We also added details on how to prevent its usage on both Google Play and App Store store descriptions.
The PC version does not have ads so of course this topic does not apply to PC players.
Google Analytics for Firebase (Mobile users only)
This is our analytics provider and, for those of you who don’t know how analytics work, they help track specific actions in the game for statistical purposes. In the early phase of Dealer’s Life development these were really important in helping us discover bugs or bad behaviors (especially connected to procedural generation) in the game.
Here are two examples that show how we use them:
- an event when a player has no special encounters available which help discover possible situations where the procedural generation for special encounters has “blocking” conditions that prevent the generation.
- an event that counts each game lost and each game won, which helped us keep the game balanced. In fact, if we saw too many games lost after an update, we were sure that we had changed something that made the game more difficult and this triggered a global balance check on our side.
Each event is of course completely anonymous meaning that we don’t know who has triggered the event but we just know what happened (i.e.: someone won the game).
Google Analytics for Firebase uses cookies, unique device identifiers for advertising (Google Advertiser ID or IDFA, for example) and Usage Data, as specified in Google privacy policy.
This topic does not apply to PC players: the PC version does not have analytics as Google Firebase does not support PC builds, which is unfortunate because, as we said above, they really can be helpful in balancing the game, but we decided to work on other game-related tasks rather than find a new analytics provider.
Other services
Google Play Games, Apple Game Center and Steam have their own privacy policies, if you want to know more be sure to read them on their websites.
In conclusion
We don’t receive any real personal information about our players, we just use these tools to develop the game and provide the best level of quality possible for all our players.
As always, if you have any question or concern feel free to ask and we’ll gladly answer as soon as possible.
Your friendly indie devs,
Abyte Entertainment
