Privacy Policy

Steel Tide is made by one developer, Rene Wang ("we"). This policy covers the game wherever you play it — in a browser at play.steelti.de, through Steam, from the App Store or from Google Play — the dedicated server software that players run themselves, and this website. It is written to be read rather than scrolled past, and the whole of it fits on this page.

What stays on your device

Everything the game remembers about you is kept on the device you play on, in the browser's or the app's local storage: your settings (language, volume, interface options), your saved games, your last skirmish setup, a custom map you loaded, and the commander name you last used in multiplayer. None of it is sent to us. There is no cloud save and no account to attach one to.

Deleting it is up to you: clear the site's data in your browser, or uninstall the app. The Steam version keeps the same data in the game's own user-data folder on your computer.

The store versions collect nothing

The Steam, iOS and Android versions of Steel Tide ship with everything inside the app and make no network connection of their own. They contain no analytics, no advertising SDK, no crash reporter and no third-party service of any kind, and they collect no data about you. The only time one of them talks to the internet is when you choose to: joining a multiplayer server (below), or opening a link that hands you to your browser.

This is why the App Store privacy label says Data Not Collected and the Google Play data safety section says no data is collected or shared. Those statements are the whole truth, not a summary of it.

Steam. When you play through Steam, the Steam client may provide the game with your Steam persona name — the game offers it as your default commander name in multiplayer — and achievements, once the game has them, are recorded by Steam on your account. What Steam itself collects is governed by Valve's privacy policy, not by this one.

The browser version and this website

play.steelti.de and steelti.de are served by Vercel. Like every web server, theirs receives the technical information a request carries — your IP address, your browser type and the page requested — and may hold it briefly in logs to run and secure the service. We do not build profiles from it.

Both sites use Vercel Web Analytics to count visits. It sets no cookies, stores nothing on your device and does not follow you across sites. It records the page viewed, the page that led to it, your country, and your browser, operating system and device type; one visitor is told apart from another by a hash of the request that is reset daily and is never linked to a name.

The analytics script loads only after the game has started and never in the store versions. The game does not need it to run, and a blocker that stops it changes nothing.

Multiplayer

Steel Tide has no matchmaking, no lobby service and no accounts. The game never connects to a multiplayer server on its own: you pick one, by typing its address or opening an invitation link, and most servers are run by players themselves, on their own machine or one they rent. Whoever runs a server is its operator, and this policy cannot speak for them.

When you connect, the server receives what it needs to seat you in a match: the commander name you typed, your chat messages, your game commands, a saved game if you upload one as host, and — as with any connection over the internet — your IP address. The server gives you a session id and a reconnect token so that a dropped connection can be resumed; both are meaningless anywhere but on that server. Your name and your messages are shown to the other people in the room. Chat is relayed with English profanity masked in transit and is not kept beyond the room's own backlog. A server may write a checkpoint of the running match to disk so that a restart does not lose it, and its logs may record connections, IP address included.

If you run a server yourself, you are its operator: everything it receives is on your machine and in your hands.

If we run a server ourselves, we keep only what is described here, use it only to run and protect the matches on it, and keep it no longer than that takes.

Children

The game is not directed at children and, since it collects nothing, does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under the age of digital consent where they live. Multiplayer chat is only as safe as the server you join: prefer servers run by people you know.

Your rights

Where data protection law gives you rights over personal data — to see it, correct it, have it deleted or object to its use — you can exercise them by writing to hi@steelti.de. In practice there is very little we could hold: the browser analytics is anonymous by design and the store versions send us nothing, so most requests are answered by pointing at this page. Data on your device you can delete yourself, as described above; for a multiplayer server, write to its operator.

Where it matters legally, the little processing we do — serving the sites and counting visits — rests on our legitimate interest in running and improving Steel Tide.

Changes

When this policy changes, the new text is published here with the date at the top updated. A change that matters — one that would have the game collect something it does not collect today — is also called out in the changelog.

Contact

Questions about privacy, or about anything on this page: hi@steelti.de.