Slime Merge — privacy & data

Screen-time batches

The game’s name, the per-launch id, the kind of device, the game version, and one row per screen opened since the last batch - its name, how many times it was opened and how many seconds it was shown - plus a few event counts recorded the same way (for example how often the cloud-save conflict prompt appeared). This is the only statistic the game sends: there is no daily report and no install id.

When: About every two minutes while the game is running, and again when it is paused, sent to the background or closed. A batch that fails is dropped, not kept for later.

Sent to: https://lostphantom.live/api/universe/analytics

Every name in it, read out of the game’s code: game session platform version screens name views seconds

Platform: the kind of device as one word: desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux and Steam Deck alike), android, ios, console or web.

Identifier: A random id made fresh every time the game starts and never saved on your device, so two launches cannot be linked to each other.

Turning it off: the Anonymous stats switch, on Settings, in the GAME section. It is ON by default. Off stops the batches and drops the one waiting to go. RESET TO DEFAULTS, the GAME section’s own reset and WIPE EVERYTHING all turn it back on; the choice travels to another device only through the optional Slime Universe account.

What we keep: Only totals per day, per screen and per kind of device - how many times each screen was opened, for how long, and by how many launches - kept for two years; and the per-launch id, for two to three days, only so one launch is not counted twice. Nothing else from the batch is kept, not even the version. Your IP address reaches our server with the request, as it does for any connection; it is held in memory for a few minutes to limit how often a report is accepted, and it is never written to a table or a log.

Where this is read from: SlimeMerge: SlimeMerge/Assets/Scripts/Shared/SlimeAnalytics.cs Payload (the body), Flush (when) and Allowed (the default); MergeSettings.cs, the `stats` option (the row)

Bug reports and suggestions

Only what you write, and only when you press SEND. With it go six things the game already knows: the version and whether this is a public or a tester build, the platform and hardware model, the language you are reading, which screen you were on, and a short tail of the game’s own log — about forty lines, with the folder name of whoever is signed in to the machine folded out of it, because a log line carries that path all the time and on a desktop that path has an account name in the middle of it. No name, no account, no email, no device name (on a phone that is frequently the owner’s own name), no location, and no install id — the intake accepts one and this game does not send it.

Honesty note: there is no switch in front of the box, because it sends nothing unless you have written a report and pressed SEND. The Anonymous stats row above deliberately does NOT silence this — turning off statistics says you do not want to be measured, not that you no longer want to be able to report a crash, and taking the box away with the switch would leave the people most careful about their data with no way to tell anybody anything.

Where this is read from: SlimeMerge: SlimeMerge/Assets/Scripts/MergeFeedbackCore.cs (Context() is the one list; MergeFeedback.cs measures it and is the only sender, held by SlimeMerge/Tools/checks/feedback.py)

• Your name, username, email address or any account of any kind - no game sends one. The studio’s statistics address (/api/<game>/telemetry) REFUSES a report carrying a field named like one of those, or any value shaped like an email address, with an error saying so. Slime Wars’ daily report goes to an older address that stores it as sent without that check, and it carries no such field.
• Your IP address is never stored. It reaches our server with every request, as it does for any connection, and the server holds it in memory for a few minutes to limit how often reports are accepted, then forgets it. No table has a column for it and it is not logged. (What our hosting provider’s own network logs keep is outside our code.)
• Anything you type. No chat, no search, and no bug-report text travels with the statistics.
• Your location, contacts, files, other running programs, or anything at all from outside the game.
• No advertising and no third-party analytics service runs in any of these games, and nothing is sold, rented or shared with anybody. Outside this studio’s own statistics, and not governed by its switch: every game is built with Unity, whose engine can report basic hardware details and crashes to Unity; Winter Is Here and Slime Wars tell Steam which achievements you unlock, and Slime Wars also reports lifetime playtime, kills, wins and losses to its Steam stats and leaderboards and signs in to Unity’s player-account service with your Steam login for its online features. Slime Wars and Slime Dominion include Unity’s ad library for a possible phone version and never start it, and Winter Is Here carries PlayFab and Photon code from an older project that nothing calls.

What this adds up to on our side is mostly charts. Per game and per day the dashboard shows:

• how many installs were heard from that day, and how many were new
• total sessions and total minutes played
• which screens took the most time, added up across everybody
• which versions are still in the wild
• whether an install came back a day or a week later

For the games that send a daily report (Winter Is Here, Dug Out, Smokestack Valley, Pencil and Paper and Slime Wars) we also keep one record per install - its latest totals and the first and last day it was heard from - and the dashboard lists a few of them under a short label that stays the same between visits. So we can tell one install from another, but not who is behind it: there is no name, account, Steam id, email or IP address anywhere in it, and the id is random. The screen-time batches keep no per-install record at all.

• A Slime Universe account is optional and separate: if you create one, the name and friend code you chose are covered by the studio privacy policy, and none of the anonymous statistics above are ever joined to it.