How Overwolf Keeps Users Safe from Bans
As a tech platform for game applications, we have a unique challenge to overcome — empowering creators to build great apps knowing that we keep both their products and their users safe from any negative repercussions.
We often get asked about our commitment to compliance with game developers, and the steps we take to ensure we’re never at odds with their policies and terms of service. Needless to say, this is a high priority — this commitment is how we keep gamers safe and their accounts free from bans and other nasty surprises.
So let’s talk about compliance! We’d like to share some policies, showcase past solutions and explain why you need not worry while developing or using Overwolf apps.
Comply with the Terms of Service
Communicating with game creators and publishers can be challenging — it takes time, and sometimes it’s hard for developers to understand why gamers prefer to play their game with a certain app.
Our goal is to be fully aligned with developers, therefore, our work starts before ever talking to them directly. The first step is working with our creators to fit each app’s concept to Game Developer ToS, and instruct our creators on how to build apps that are fully compliant with how the devs wanted their game to be played.
Sometimes things are more complicated than that, and we have to fit an app not only to a game’s ToS but also to specific activities within it — for example, making an app work differently in different game modes, or changing their functions when there’s ranking on the line.
Regardless of how complex compliance is, our continued commitment has earned us trust among top game developers, so as a creator you can expect us to facilitate these aspects of development on your behalf to a degree. Just last year, Riot mentioned us as an example for a platform that they like working with in terms of compliance:
Never Break the Game
Our commitment to game developers goes deeper than just conforming to ToS, and along the years we have built relationships that enable us to really figure out issues together.
Overwolf apps can provide information, quality of life features, visual comfort, better UI, and much more — but they will never tilt the balance of any game.
We take care to never provide features or game data that aren’t already available — apps just display that information in an approachable, intuitive way without having to alt+tab to an external browser.
This commitment is ours, regardless of the game being played. Through the years, placing game balance as a top priority made us trusted by top industry brands including Riot, Intel, Alienware, G2, Cloud9, Team Liquid, Logitech, Asus, MSI, nVidia, PUBG and many more.
Align with Gamer Priorities
Compliance is not always about breaking the game or matching developer ToS, there’s also legal and moral best practices to implement. For example, GDPR and how we handle user data — fully anonymized, fully transparent and easily opt-outable. You can read more about how we keep gamer privacy safe here.
Lastly but perhaps most importantly, we have to make sure none of our apps cause performance issues or drop game framerates — both gamers and game developers will never stand for it and rightfully so.
We test each product and follow up on every report, as well as work with each app’s development team to make sure apps are optimized and running as efficiently as possible. Read more about safekeeping hardware performance here.
Full Platform-side Support
While we ensure our apps and content are allowed and encouraged by game developers, the gaming ecosystem moves fast and things happen unexpectedly. Companies change their terms of service from time to time, games become more competitive and get stricter rules, and an app developer might post an update that breaks this policy which we might miss.
However, our commitment to gamers and creators fully covers these cases as well — if any user on our platform gets banned or otherwise hurt by game publishers for using apps, we’ll be taking point and personally reaching out to that company to fix it in record time, regardless of which app has caused an issue.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you’ve had any issues whatsoever of that sort, if your app is being moderated or has issues with a game publisher, or if your users are reporting any action against their accounts — we’re here to help. You can also open a support ticket here.
Thank you, and game on!
