Sideload Developer Agreement

Version 1.0, 2026-09-09.

This is the agreement between you, a developer publishing a game through Sideload, and Sideload. Its version number is recorded against your developer account when you accept it, and that version governs every game you publish while it is current. You can read it at any time without asking anyone.

Before Sideload issues you an invite token, you confirm that you have read this and agree to it. That confirmation, the version number and the date are what Sideload records. There is no other way to get a token during the alpha.

If you are here as a player rather than a developer, the terms cover that instead.

1. What this covers

Every game you publish, meaning every build and every piece of store artwork you upload through sideload publish, for as long as this version is current.

2. Your game is yours

You keep every right you have in your game: the code, the art, the audio, the design, and anything else you built or licensed into it. Nothing here transfers ownership of any part of it to Sideload.

3. The licence you grant

To distribute your game at all, Sideload needs permission to serve it. You grant Sideload a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, cache, transcode for delivery and publicly display your build and your store artwork, for the purpose of distributing your game through Sideload and promoting it on Sideload’s own surfaces.

It does not extend anywhere Sideload does not itself operate, and it gives Sideload no right to sell your game.

The licence ends when you or Sideload removes the game, with one honest exception: copies already sitting in caches and content delivery networks expire on their own schedule. Sideload stops serving your game to new players immediately, but cannot promise every copy the infrastructure made has already vanished.

4. What you warrant

You own it, or you are licensed to use everything in it. Code, art, audio, fonts, anything else.

It meets section 5.

It does what your listing says, and nothing it does not say. In particular, if your sideload.json declares requires.network: false, your build makes no network requests once it is running. Declaring a capability you do not use is harmless. Using one you did not declare breaks this warranty, and a requires.network: false game phoning home is the case that matters most, because neither a player nor Sideload can see it coming.

5. What you may publish

Non-adult games of any genre and any level of polish. A jam entry, a prototype or an experiment is as welcome as a finished game. Unfinished is fine. Broken is not: a game that crashes, fails to load, or does not do what its listing says.

None of the following is allowed, whatever its quality, intent or framing:

• Sexual or adult content of any kind, including AI-generated adult content
• Hate speech, harassment, or content targeting real people or groups
• Real-money gambling, or simulated gambling built around purchasable currency
• Assets, characters, music or trademarks you do not own and have not licensed
• Malware, cryptominers, credential harvesting, or any undisclosed network activity

Each of those is prohibited because of what it does to someone else. Malware and undisclosed network activity run on a player’s own machine, and the sandbox narrows what a hostile build reaches without making it acceptable to host. Harassment harms the people it targets. Infringing assets take from a developer who is not in the room.

Unsure whether something crosses the line? Ask at master@drnkn.dev before you submit rather than after.

6. Removals

Sideload may remove your game at any time. Where possible you are told first. Where the content is illegal, malicious or infringing, it may come down without notice, because waiting is not compatible with content that is harmful while it stays up.

You may remove your own game at any time, without a reason and without approval.

Removing a game unpublishes it. It never reaches into a copy a player already has.

Repeated violations of section 5 end your access, and your invite token with it.

How a report is made, what happens next, and how you dispute a removal are in the terms.

7. No warranty, no uptime commitment

Sideload provides hosting and distribution as it is, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or fit for any particular purpose. There is no service-level agreement. The service may be slow, unavailable, or changed without notice.

8. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Sideload is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost revenue, profits, data or goodwill, arising out of this agreement or your use of Sideload.

9. How this changes

Sideload may publish a new version. It gets a new version number, and keeping a game listed under it requires accepting that version, recorded the same way this one was.

10. This is an alpha

There are no players yet. There is a launcher, a landing page, and a small hand-recruited set of developers with invite tokens. The service will change, sometimes in ways that affect how your game is hosted or displayed, and this agreement will be superseded once the product has players.