DEVELOPER AGREEMENT

This Developer Agreement is between Gems Arcadia ("Gems Arcadia", "we", "us") and the person or studio that creates a developer profile on https://gemsarcadia.com ("you", "the developer"). It applies on top of our Terms of Service and Privacy Notice. Where they conflict on anything to do with developing, uploading or earning from games, this agreement wins.

You accept this agreement when you create a developer profile, upload a build, submit a game for review or use a developer API key, whichever happens first. If you act for a company or studio, you confirm that you're authorised to bind it, and "you" means that company or studio.

You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter into a binding contract to become a developer.

Please save or print a copy of this page. The date at the top shows which version you accepted.

Your developer profile is attached to your Gems Arcadia player account. Your studio name, studio URL, bio and website are shown publicly on your games, so keep them accurate and don't impersonate another studio or Gems Arcadia itself.

From the developer portal you can create up to 10 active API keys. Live keys start with ga_live_ and test keys with ga_test_. Both can read the sessions and coin insertions of every game you own, and only live keys can submit trusted scores.

• A key is shown once, when you create it. We store only a one-way (SHA-256) hash of it, so we can't show it to you again or recover it.
• Use keys only on your own servers. Never put a key in a game build, a browser, a mobile app, a public repository or anywhere a player could read it.
• Rotate a key by creating a new one, switching your servers to it, and then revoking the old one in the portal. Revoke a key straight away if you think it has leaked, and tell us at the address in the Contact section.
• You are responsible for everything done with your keys and your account until a key is revoked, including requests made by anyone you share them with.
• We may revoke or block a key that appears compromised, is used abusively or breaks this agreement, and will tell you when we do.

You upload each game as a zip build with an index.html at its root, together with a cover image, screenshots, a description and a price per credit. The current size and file-type limits are listed in the developer documentation and enforced on upload.

• A person from our team reviews every game, and every new build of a live game, before players can see it. Until a new build is approved, the previously approved build keeps running.
• We may approve or reject a build at our discretion, applying this agreement and the submission guidelines. If we reject a build, we email you the reviewer's reasons so you can fix them and resubmit.
• You can preview your own unpublished builds. Previews run in test mode: no coins are charged and nothing is earned.
• Your store page (title, description, screenshots, trailer, genres, tags and controls) must honestly show the game players will get. Trailers may only be linked from YouTube or Vimeo.
• Approval is not an endorsement and doesn't mean we've tested the game for every defect. You remain responsible for your game.

Gems Arcadia is a skill-based arcade for entertainment, and our payment provider, Paystack, restricts or prohibits many kinds of business. A game, its store page and anything it links to must not contain, promote or offer any of the following. We will reject or suspend a game that does.

Gambling and prizes

• Real-money gambling of any kind: betting, wagering, casino or slot-machine games played for value, lotteries, raffles, sweepstakes, pools or fantasy contests with an entry fee and a prize.
• Cash, cryptocurrency, gift cards, vouchers, physical goods or anything else of real-world value as a prize or reward, whether the result depends on skill, chance or both.
• Random rewards bought with coins: loot boxes, gacha pulls, spins or mystery prizes that a player pays coins for.
• Any way to cash out, sell, transfer or trade coins, Prize Tickets, scores or in-game items for money or crypto, inside or outside the game.
• Gambling vocabulary or imagery that makes a game look like it pays out, such as jackpots, odds or payout tables for coin-paid plays.

Coins, Prize Tickets and prizes from the daily wheel have no cash value. They can't be withdrawn, sold, transferred or exchanged for money, and Prize Tickets can't be exchanged for coins. Gems Arcadia is an arcade of games of skill for entertainment: you can't bet on outcomes and you can't win money.

Restricted content

• Sexually explicit or adult content, nudity or sexual services. Mild cartoon violence is fine; graphic or gratuitous violence is not.
• Hate speech, harassment, or content that discriminates on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability or any other protected ground, or that incites violence.
• Content involving or appealing to the sexual exploitation of children, which we report to the authorities.
• Promotion or sale of weapons, ammunition, explosives, illegal drugs, drug paraphernalia, prescription medicines, tobacco, vaping products or alcohol.
• Cryptocurrency, investment, trading, forex, pyramid, multi-level marketing or get-rich-quick schemes, and unlicensed financial services.
• Counterfeit goods, pirated content, or material that infringes anyone's copyright, trade marks or other rights.
• Anything illegal in South Africa, or that encourages illegal activity.

Harmful mechanics

• Charging coins without a clear player action, hiding the price of a credit, auto-repeating charges, or timers that spend coins.
• Imitating the arcade's wallet, login or payment screens, or asking players for passwords, card details or other payment information.
• Malware, crypto mining, tracking scripts, advertising networks, or code that tries to escape the game's sandbox or attack players, other games or our systems.

Your game runs in a sandboxed frame without access to the player's account or cookies. It talks to Gems Arcadia only through our SDK, and the arcade page moves the coins on the player's behalf. Your servers can check sessions and insertions through the Coin API with an API key.

• Sessions: a play session starts when a signed-in player opens your game, and expires after 30 minutes without activity. Don't keep playing on, or charge for, an expired session.
• Insert coin: you set a price of 1 to 5 coins per credit. Ask for a coin only when the player chooses to play or continue, and grant exactly one credit for each successful insertion. If an insertion fails, for example because the player doesn't have enough coins, grant nothing and give the player a way out.
• Use a fresh idempotency key for each new insertion and reuse it only to retry the same insertion. Replays are charged once.
• Scores: submit one score per paid insertion, as the player's real result for that run. We may remove scores that are impossible, manipulated or above your game's declared maximum.
• Don't circumvent the wallet: never sell, give or take coins, credits or paid content outside the SDK, never take payment from players directly, and never inflate insertions, play your own games for earnings, or use bots or scripts to generate plays.
• Rate limits: we limit coin insertions, session starts, score submissions and failed API-key attempts, and the current limits are in the developer documentation. Design your game to handle a RATE_LIMITED or BUSY reply, and don't try to get around a limit.
• We may change the SDK and the Coin API. We version the public API, list changes in the developer changelog, and try to give reasonable notice before removing something you rely on, unless security or the law requires faster action.

We don't give you players' email addresses, account ids or payment details. Through the SDK and the Coin API you receive:

• a playerRef, a pseudonymous id (starting pr_) that stays the same for a player across all your games but is different for every studio, so it can't be used to link players between studios;
• the player's display name, which the game may show on screen;
• session and insertion ids, coin counts, credit prices, timestamps and whether a session is in test mode;
• public reviews of your games, with the reviewer's public profile.

A display name or playerRef can still identify a person, so treat everything you receive from us as personal information under the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA). You must:

• use it only to run your game, show scores and fix problems, and never sell it, share it or use it for advertising or profiling;
• not try to identify a player, or link a playerRef to any other data about them;
• not collect personal information inside your game: no sign-up forms, email or phone fields, chat that shares contact details, location, camera or microphone access, or third-party tracking;
• keep any data you store secure, delete it when you no longer need it, and tell us without delay (within 72 hours at the latest) if it is lost, accessed or used without authorisation;
• help us answer a player's request to access, correct or delete their information, and delete a player's data when we ask you to.

Gems Arcadia remains the responsible party for players' personal information. When you process it for your game, you do so for the purposes above and must comply with POPIA, including its rules on security (section 19) and on sending personal information outside South Africa (section 72).

For the purposes of this agreement, one coin is worth $0.25 (US dollars), whatever pack it came from and whatever currency the player paid in. Your revenue share is 70% of the value of the coins players insert into your published games, and Gems Arcadia keeps the rest.

• Each successful coin insertion records one earning in your earnings ledger, in the same database transaction that debits the player. The share is worked out per insertion in whole US cents and rounded down.
• Your share per credit is: 1 coin per credit, $0.17; 2 coins per credit, $0.35; 3 coins per credit, $0.52; 4 coins per credit, $0.70; 5 coins per credit, $0.87.
• Coins earn the same whether the player bought them or received them free (for example bonus, starter, achievement or daily wheel coins).
• Test-mode plays, previews, replayed insertions and failed insertions earn nothing.
• The earnings dashboard shows your recorded earnings per game and per day, and you can export them as a CSV file.

Payouts are not available yet

Gems Arcadia does not pay developers out at the moment. There is no payout schedule, minimum payout, payout method or payout currency yet, and we don't collect bank or tax details. Recorded earnings are an accounting record of your revenue share. They are not a balance you can withdraw, and no amount is due to you until payouts open.

• Before payouts open we will publish payout terms as an update to this agreement. They will cover how and when you are paid, the payout currency and exchange rate, any minimum amount, identity, bank and tax checks, and any fees. They will apply to earnings recorded before that date as well as after.
• We may correct or withhold recorded earnings that come from errors, fraud, self-play, bots or other invalid activity, from purchases that are refunded or charged back, or from a game that broke this agreement. We will tell you what we changed and why.
• You are responsible for your own taxes on anything we pay you.

You keep ownership of your games and everything in them. You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence, for as long as your game is on the platform, to:

• host, store, copy, serve and run your builds, and make the technical changes needed to do so (such as security headers, compression and caching);
• show your game, studio name, logo, cover, screenshots, trailer, description and gameplay on the site and in our emails, social media and other promotion of the arcade;
• let players play your game and share links to it.

When a game is removed we stop offering it to players within a reasonable time, but we may keep copies in backups, audit logs, and earnings and play records, and promotional material already published may remain.

You promise that you own or are licensed to use everything in your game and store page (code, art, music, sound, fonts, names and trade marks), that you have credited third-party assets where their licence requires it, and that your game doesn't infringe anyone's rights or break any law. You give us a limited licence to use our name, SDK and documentation only to build and publish games on the arcade.

If you believe a game on Gems Arcadia infringes your copyright or other rights, email the support email address on our Contact page with:

• your name and contact details;
• the work or right you say is infringed, and evidence that you own or represent it;
• the link to the game or page, and what in it infringes;
• a statement that the information is accurate and that you are the rights holder or authorised to act for them.

1. We review the notice and, where it looks valid, suspend the game. A suspended game stops being served to players and can't be edited or resubmitted until the suspension is lifted.
2. We tell the developer and give them a chance to respond, unless the law or a risk of harm prevents it.
3. If the developer shows the complaint is wrong, or fixes the problem in a new build that passes review, we may restore the game.
4. We keep a record of the notice and the outcome.

We follow the same process for reports of prohibited content or player harm. Sending a notice you know to be false may make you liable for the damage it causes.

• We may suspend a game at any time if we reasonably believe it breaks this agreement or the law, puts players or the platform at risk, or is the subject of a takedown notice. Where we can, we tell you why and how to fix it.
• If you seriously or repeatedly break this agreement, we may also revoke your API keys, remove your games and close your developer profile.
• You may stop at any time: revoke your API keys and email us to remove your games and developer profile.
• When this agreement ends, players lose access to your games. Recorded earnings stay subject to the Earnings section, including corrections for invalid activity. The sections on player data, licence (for backups and records), liability, indemnity and governing law continue to apply.

The platform, SDK and Coin API are provided "as is". We work to keep them running but don't promise they will be uninterrupted, error-free or available in every country, or that your game will earn any particular amount.

As far as the law allows, Gems Arcadia is not liable to you for indirect or consequential loss, or for lost profits, revenue, data or goodwill, and our total liability to you under this agreement is limited to the revenue share recorded for your games in the 12 months before the claim. Nothing in this agreement limits liability for gross negligence, fraud or wilful misconduct, or anything else that can't be limited by law.

You indemnify us against claims, losses, fines and reasonable legal costs that arise from your games, your store pages, your use of player data or API keys, or your breach of this agreement, including claims that your game infringes someone's rights.

We may change this agreement, for example when payouts open or the law changes. We will post the new version here with a new date and email developers about material changes at least 30 days before they take effect, unless a change is needed sooner for legal or security reasons. If you keep developing on, or earning from, the platform after a change takes effect, you accept it. If you don't agree, you may end this agreement as described above.

This agreement is governed by the laws of the Republic of South Africa, and the courts of South Africa have jurisdiction over any dispute about it. Before going to court, please email us so we can try to resolve the matter together.

If a court finds part of this agreement unenforceable, the rest still applies. If we don't enforce a term straight away, we haven't waived it. You may not transfer this agreement without our written consent.

Send questions about this agreement, takedown notices, leaked keys and data incidents to the support email address on our Contact page. Our full business details, including the address for legal notices, are on https://gemsarcadia.com/contact.