Privacy notice

Who is responsible for SteamWatch?

SteamWatch is an independent Steam data website operated by the SteamWatch site owner. For privacy questions or to exercise your data-protection rights, contact [email protected].

What we collect

SteamWatch does not offer visitor accounts, comments, newsletters, payments, or personalised advertising. We do not intentionally store a visitor's name, email address, Steam account, or browsing history in the SteamWatch website database.

Like any website, connection information such as an IP address, browser details, request time, and requested URL may be processed by our hosting and security infrastructure to deliver, secure, and diagnose the service. Search terms and game App IDs are used to return results or begin requested game tracking; they are not used to build visitor profiles.

Why we use this information

We use limited technical information to operate the website, prevent abuse, maintain security, and investigate faults. Where UK or EU data-protection law applies, this is normally our legitimate interest in running a secure public data service. We do not sell personal data or use it for marketing.

Service providers and third parties

• Cloudflare provides DNS, network delivery, and security services. It may process connection data to protect and route requests.
• Our self-hosted server runs the SteamWatch application and database.
• Steam supplies public game data and much of the game artwork displayed by the site. Your browser may contact Steam to load that artwork, and links to Steam open Steam's own website.
• Twitch statistics are collected server-to-server through Twitch's API. SteamWatch does not embed Twitch video or send visitors to Twitch merely to display these statistics.
• OpenCritic via RapidAPI is queried server-to-server to identify selected critic-review events. We send the relevant game name or OpenCritic game ID and receive public review data such as outlet, author, score, title, URL, and publication time. A visitor's browser does not call this service, and we do not send visitor IP addresses, Steam accounts, or search history to it. RapidAPI and the API provider may process the SteamWatch server's request metadata and API subscription credentials under their own terms.
• OpenAI may process compact, server-generated briefing evidence when SteamWatch prepares a game activity briefing. This can include public Steam review excerpts selected as a small balanced sample; we do not send visitor IP addresses, Steam accounts, search history, or donor information. Review excerpts are fetched on demand, held only in a short-lived service cache, and are not stored in the SteamWatch database.

Donating a game through Steam

The Donate Games page links to a separate Steam collector account. Steam handles the entire gift and purchase process; SteamWatch does not provide a donation form, take payment, or receive card, bank, billing-address, password, Steam Guard, recovery-code, or wallet information.

If you gift a game directly to the collector account, Steam may show the recipient account your Steam display name, public profile, any gift message you choose to include, the gifted game or edition, and whether the gift was accepted or declined. This information is used only to receive and manage the gift. SteamWatch does not import donor names, profiles, messages, or gift history into its public site or player-data database.

If Steam lets you send a gift by email or through another Steam gifting method, that information is supplied to Steam under Steam's own process. SteamWatch does not receive the recipient email address or your purchase details. Please do not send private credentials or product keys to SteamWatch.

Retention

Game, price, player-count, Steam-review, critic-review, and Twitch statistics are retained as dataset records, not as visitor records. Critic-review records contain published editorial information, not visitor data. We keep only the operational information needed to run and secure the service, for no longer than reasonably necessary. SteamWatch currently has no application-level visitor account or analytics database.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to request access, correction, deletion, restriction, or objection to processing of your personal data, and to complain to your local data-protection authority. Contact us first at the address above and include enough detail for us to identify the relevant request.

Changes to this notice

We will update this notice before introducing accounts, advertising, non-essential analytics, or other material privacy changes.