Privacy is good. /dev/esc only requires personal information when it's necessary and when there's a good reason for it. For example, when making a payment via Stripe, your email address gets stored.
/dev/esc is a hobby project (see "About" on this page). So being able to contact the people who've played it, might play in future, or might tell others about it, is really important. For this reason, the option to share your personal information with the site is present in a few places. For example, when you are creating a game or the newsletter sign up on the home page.
/dev/esc only uses personal information for payment processing, for collecting feedback (one email per email address per game) or for opt-outable purposes such as the mailing list.
The site embeds Google Analytics code to measure the effectiveness of advertising and traffic generation efforts. See Google's Privacy Policy for more information.
| Name | Provider | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| _ga, _gat_gtag, _gid | Google Analytics | Used to collect information anonymously about how visitors reach and use the site. The purpose is to improve the site by measuring the number of visitors, referring pages, and the pages they visited. |
| csrftoken | /dev/esc | Strictly necessary. Used to prevent Cross Site Request Forgery attacks (more details). |
| sessionid | /dev/esc | Strictly necessary if you are playing the game. Used to link your browser session to your player identity. |
/dev/esc is a personal hobby project. I started it in late 2020. I shared it on Hacker News ("Show HN") while it was completely free to play, and hundreds of teams played it. That really helped convince me it's a good idea, worth persisting with.
Now I'm trying to make the project a small earner, partly as a challenge to myself. That means getting more people to the site and encouraging them to pay to play. People arrive via search, via links on other websites or via online advertising. No hiding from it: it's a volume game.
This last route costs money, and while the site isn't earning a lot, I am keeping a close eye on that. I tried to avoid Google Analytics for a while, but tracking my spend ended up resembling a rewrite of Google Analytics, with none of the benefits.
So, reluctantly, with little time to spend and a desire to spend my efforts on making the content better, I've gone with Google Analytics.
— Richard, /dev/esc creator