Privacy Policy

Visiting the site

We don't use cookies, ad trackers or user accounts, and the site has no forms.

We count visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics. It doesn't use cookies and doesn't build visitor profiles. It gives us totals such as page views, referring sites, countries and browser types.

We also run a small measurement script of our own, so we can see which pages help people. When you leave a page or switch away from it, the script sends us the page address, how many seconds the page was on screen, how far down it was scrolled (in quarters of the page) and the site you came from, as a domain name only (such as google.com). When you click a store link, play a video on the page or click Fix a fact, it sends which game and list position the click was for.

The script sets no cookies, saves nothing on your device and sends no ID, so one visit can't be linked to another visit or to you. We don't store your IP address or browser details with these counts. Cloudflare stores the counts for us (Workers Analytics Engine) for a limited time, and we keep only daily totals per page, per game and per referring site. If your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal, the script sends nothing.

Sometimes we test a change, such as adding a trailer to a list. Which version a page shows depends on the page and the week, never on who you are, and the script sends the version along with the counts above.

The site is hosted on Cloudflare. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes your IP address and request details to deliver pages and protect the site from abuse. See Cloudflare's privacy policy.

Some lists embed a YouTube video in YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode (youtube-nocookie.com). When you play the video, YouTube may store cookies or similar data under Google's Privacy Policy.

Store links take you to Steam, PlayStation Store, Xbox or Nintendo eShop, where their own privacy policies apply. Links to sponsored games carry UTM tags, so the store can show the game's publisher how many visits came from our pages in total. These tags don't identify you.

Email

If you write to contact@nextindiegames.com, we use your address and message only to reply and to keep the conversation on file.

We sometimes email studios whose games appear in our lists, using contact addresses the studios publish. These emails are sent through Brevo, which records whether a message was delivered and opened and whether a link in it was clicked. Reply "no thanks" and we won't write again. We keep that address on a do-not-contact list so it stays that way.

Next Indie Games Uploader (YouTube API and reports)

Next Indie Games Uploader is an internal tool that uploads and schedules videos on our own YouTube channel and reads reports about our own channel and site. Only our team uses it. It is not offered to the public.

The tool uses YouTube API Services. Anyone who uses it agrees to the YouTube Terms of Service, and Google's Privacy Policy applies.

With the access we grant it, the tool uploads video files, titles, descriptions, thumbnails and caption files to our channel and sets their publish times. It also adds our videos to our playlists, posts our own comments under our videos, updates our channel description and searches public YouTube videos to find the official trailers of games in our lists. It does not read, store or share data about other YouTube users or viewers.

It reads YouTube Analytics reports for our own channel: daily totals per video, such as views, watch time, impressions, click-through rate, traffic sources and subscribers gained. YouTube gives these only as totals, without information about individual viewers. We keep them in our private project files to plan our videos.

With read-only access, it also reads Google Search Console reports for nextindiegames.com: clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position per page and per search query, as daily totals. We keep them in the same private files to improve our pages.

Its authorization tokens are kept encrypted in our build system (GitHub Actions) and are used only for the tasks on this page. Our use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Access can be revoked at any time on the Google Account permissions page.

Ads

We don't show ads. If we add them, we will update this page before they go live.

Sharing

We don't sell or rent personal data. We share it only with the services named on this page, and only as far as they need it to run the site and our email.

Changes and contact

When this policy changes, the date at the top changes too. Questions about your data: contact@nextindiegames.com.