Data and privacy
Afterpatch is an independent project that watches how players receive game updates on Steam. No visitor sign-up, no ads, no tracking.
Where the data comes from
Public reviews and news of games on Steam. Afterpatch is not affiliated with Valve; Steam is a trademark of Valve Corporation, game names and covers belong to their owners.
Reviews are shown without author names or profiles. We don't store the author's Steam ID — only the review itself, its rating, language and the author's playtime.
What AI writes
Event analyses, weekly and monthly digests, review topics, short summaries and quote translations are written by a language model. Code checks the numbers in its texts against the data and quotes word for word against the reviews, otherwise a text isn't shown. Still, the model can misread things — treat it as an opinion, not a fact.
The model runs at an external provider; it receives review and news texts and numbers, but no visitor data.
What we know about visitors
- Only two cookies: your chosen language and a sign-in session for the site's account holders.
- Your theme and chart-layer choices are remembered in your own browser (localStorage) — they never reach our server, and clearing site data removes them.
- Visits are counted without cookies, by a daily fingerprint of address and browser with a salt that lives for a day and then disappears. It can't link visits on different days or recover the address.
- Only daily counters are kept: pages opened and the landing page, buttons clicked, the referring site and campaign tag, device type (desktop, phone, tablet), browser and page language, and time on site in rough buckets. None of these numbers is tied to a particular visitor.
- Your IP address is kept in memory for an hour to a day — to limit overly frequent requests, password guessing and request spam.
- A request to add a game is stored with an address fingerprint (a hash with the site's secret key) — so each address counts once.
- Server logs — address, requested page, browser — are used for debugging and protection; their size is capped and old entries are overwritten within days to weeks.
- Your browser loads game covers straight from Steam's servers — Valve sees that request, as with any site showing Steam images. There are no other third-party scripts or fonts.
Rights
Code, design, site copy, analyses and digests — © 2026 Afterpatch, all rights reserved. Reviews belong to their authors; games, titles and cover art belong to their rights holders and are quoted and shown here to describe how players reacted.
Review quotes are the words of their authors, published on Steam, not the views of Afterpatch: we don't edit them and aren't responsible for their content or accuracy. Reviews can contain strong language and false claims. If you see a quote that doesn't belong here, write to us and we'll remove it.
Contact
Data error, request to remove a review or quote, rights holder question — write to: hello@afterpat.ch.
Updated: October 3, 2026.