Terms of Service

8BitGo (this site, at 8bitgo.com) was created, is developed and is operated by one independent developer acting as an individual. There is no company, no investor and no team.

Everything — account problems, copyright complaints, data requests — goes to one address:

• Email: [email protected]

One person reads all of it, so replies are not immediate. Copyright takedowns and account-security mail are handled first.

Age

• You must be at least 13 to use this site, including browsing and trying games.
• Between 13 and the age of majority where you live, use the site only with the knowledge and consent of a parent or guardian.
• Games marked adult-rated have an additional requirement: you must be signed in, and the date of birth on your account must show that you are 18 or older. That check runs on the server and cannot be bypassed from the browser.

Where you are

The site is reachable worldwide, but we do not warrant that it complies with every law of your country or region. Deciding whether using this site is lawful where you are is your responsibility. If local law prohibits access to content offered here, do not access it.

One account per person

You should not create multiple accounts to evade a ban or manipulate ratings.

How to create one

You can register with an email address and password, sign in with an emailed code, or sign in with a Google, Microsoft or Apple account.

Accounts are merged on the verified email address. If you register with an email and later sign in with a Google account on that same address, you land in the same account — this is deliberate, so that one person does not end up with several sets of saves that cannot see each other.

What is on you

• Keep your password and your sign-in mailbox secure. Anything done through your account is treated as done by you.
• Give a truthful date of birth. It can only be entered once and you cannot change it afterwards (it is write-once by design). If you got it wrong, email us and the operator will clear it so you can re-enter it.
• Do not lend your account to anyone, and do not buy or sell accounts.

What we may do

If an account is used for anything the "House rules" clause prohibits, we may restrict features, suspend or delete it without prior notice. Clearly unlawful content leads to an immediate ban.

Closing your account

You can close it yourself: start the deletion from your profile, we email a code to the address on the account, and once it is verified the account is deleted together with your favourites, recently played, cloud saves, comments, ratings and collections. What still remains after deletion is listed item by item in the Privacy Policy.

The games are not ours

Copyright and trademark in the games, characters, names, music and artwork on this site belong to their respective owners. 8BitGo claims no rights in them and is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by those owners.

What we actually offer

• Homebrew and openly licensed works — where the author permits free distribution.
• Older works of unclear rights status — a large number of last-century commercial games whose ownership cannot be established from public sources, and whose original publisher may no longer exist. For these we operate notice and takedown: on a valid notice from a rights holder or their authorised agent we remove the item without argument.
• Your own files — in "Play local" you can pick a ROM from your own computer. Those files are read inside your browser only and are never uploaded to our servers.

What you must do

Only run games you are legally entitled to hold a backup of, or homebrew and openly licensed works. Whether the law where you live permits you to hold a given backup is for you to judge and to bear.

The site itself

8BitGo's interface design, code, written copy, interface icons and the original curation and descriptions on the site belong to the operator, except where another source is credited. Use the site freely, but please do not copy or mirror it wholesale, or repackage its content as your own product.

If you are a rights holder or their authorised agent and believe something here infringes your rights, email [email protected] with "Copyright" in the subject line.

So that it can be handled quickly, please include:

1. Your name, the rights holder you represent, and a contact address we can reply to.
2. The specific work you claim rights in.
3. The full URLs on this site of the material complained of, one per line.
4. A statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised.
5. A statement that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are entitled to act for the rights holder.

What we do

• On a valid notice we remove or block the material as soon as we can. One person handles this, so allow a little time — but it will not be left undone.
• If the material was submitted by a user, we notify that user and may act on their account.
• Accounts that repeatedly submit infringing material are banned.

If you think we removed something wrongly

If your material was removed but you believe you hold the rights or that the use was permitted, reply with your reasoning and any evidence and we will look again.

You may submit comments, ratings, collections, a nickname and avatar, game suggestions, and chat messages while streaming.

What is public

• Comments are public and show your nickname, your avatar and a marker for the country or region you were in when you posted.
• Ratings are shown in aggregate.
• Collections are public without exception — there is no "visible only to me" option. A collection carries your nickname and avatar. If you do not want a list to be seen, do not make it a collection.
• Chat messages are visible to everyone in the stream room.

The licence you give us

You keep the rights in what you submit. You also grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to store, display, reproduce and translate that content on the site and in the site's public listings — the minimum a website needs in order to run. The licence ends when you delete the content, though we cannot claw back anything others have already reposted or that search engines have cached.

What not to submit

Unlawful material, anything infringing someone else's rights, abuse and personal attacks, spam, other people's personal information, malicious code, and anything inappropriate involving minors. We may remove any of it without prior notice.

About game suggestions

When you submit a game, the file you upload and the notes you write are sent to the operator by email, and that email includes your nickname, your email address and your user ID. The file does not enter the site's database. Please do not submit files you have no right to distribute.

Please read this clause in full. It describes the default, not a feature you have to switch on.

Playing means streaming

Streaming on this site is on by default: when you start playing, a stream room is created automatically and appears in the public lobby. Any visitor can open it and watch.

What the room exposes:

• Your game picture and sound, live
• Your nickname (a random guest name if you are not signed in)
• Your country or region, device type and network latency
• Chat messages from you and from viewers

An important technical limitation

Capture relies on the browser's screen-sharing capability. On browsers that support Region Capture we crop to the game area; on browsers that do not, what goes out is the whole browser tab. Do not keep anything you would not want seen in the same tab.

How to turn it off

The player has a "Private" switch. With it on, no public room is created. The setting lives in your browser's local storage — clearing browser data returns it to the streaming default.

Multiplayer and peer-to-peer connections

Stream and multiplayer audio/video travel peer to peer (WebRTC) and are not relayed through our servers. That means:

• Whoever connects to you — a viewer or an opponent — can learn your IP address. This is inherent to WebRTC, not a choice we made; it is true of any service built on it.
• When a direct connection cannot be made, traffic is relayed, and the other side then sees the relay's address instead. The relay providers are listed in the Privacy Policy.

Your responsibility on stream

Do not broadcast infringing material, unlawful material or other people's private information. What you broadcast is on you.

While using this site, please do not:

• Scrape the site's content or game files at scale with automated tools.
• Attack, scan or load-test the site, or try to defeat access controls, age checks or rate limits.
• Forge requests to inflate play counts or ratings, or use multiple accounts to manipulate ratings.
• Impersonate anyone, or claim an official relationship with 8BitGo.
• Resell the service, or repackage the site's content as a paid product.
• Upload malicious code, or use the multiplayer, submission or save endpoints to move data for non-gameplay purposes.
• Interfere with other people's play, including harassing them in streams and multiplayer.

Breaking any of these lets us restrict or end your access immediately.

Once signed in you can store save data on our servers. Note that:

• Each save is capped at 4 MB, each account at 200 saves and 64 MB in total. Past that you have to delete something first.
• Cloud saves are not a backup service. They exist so you can carry on across devices; they are not a safe sole copy. Download anything you care about.
• We make a genuine effort to keep them, but we do not promise they will never be lost. Database faults, migrations and mistakes can all corrupt or lose saves.
• Deleting your account permanently deletes your cloud saves. They cannot be recovered.
• You can also keep saves in your browser or download them as files. Saves kept in the browser disappear when you clear browser data, and that is not something we can restore.

Everything on this site is free today — no ads, no paywall. In return:

• We give no availability commitment. There is no SLA and no uptime guarantee. The site may be unavailable at any time for maintenance, faults, migration, or reasons personal to the operator.
• We may add, change, suspend or permanently remove any feature and any game at any time. A game you are playing may disappear because of a copyright notice.
• If paid features are ever introduced we will say so clearly before charging anything, and we will not abruptly put today's free core features behind a paywall.
• If the site shuts down for good we will try to announce it in advance and leave a window to export saves, though we cannot promise that if we are forced to stop immediately.

The site depends on several third-party services for sign-in, email, content delivery and network connectivity. Those services are run by their own providers under their own terms and privacy policies. The full list is itemised in the Privacy Policy.

The site may also link to external websites. We do not control their content and are not responsible for it.

When a third-party service fails, the matching feature here fails with it, and that is outside what we can fix.

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law:

The site is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including without limitation merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty of uninterrupted, error-free or virus-free operation.

We specifically do not warrant:

• that the content is accurate, complete or current;
• that any game will run correctly on your device and browser;
• that saves will not be lost or corrupted;
• that the site or any third-party service will be uninterrupted;
• that your use of this site is lawful where you are.

Emulators run third-party software and may behave differently from the original hardware. You use them at your own risk.

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, the operator is not liable for:

• loss of data, including cloud and local saves;
• loss of profit, goodwill or opportunity;
• indirect, incidental, special, punitive or consequential damage;
• anything arising from your breach of these terms, your breach of local law, or your running game files you had no right to hold;
• anything arising from your picture, sound, IP address or other information becoming known to others while streaming or playing multiplayer;
• the acts or failures of third-party services.

Where applicable law does not permit a full exclusion, the operator's total aggregate liability is limited to the amount you have actually paid for the service — which, the site being free, is normally zero.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot be excluded by law, such as for wilful misconduct, gross negligence or personal injury.

If your use of this site — in particular the content you submit, the files you send in, what you broadcast, or your running game files you had no right to hold — leads a third party to bring a claim, complaint or proceeding against the operator, you are responsible for the resulting liability, loss and reasonable costs of responding.

You may stop using the site at any time, or close your account as described under "Accounts".

We may suspend or end your access at any time if you breach these terms or if we are legally required to.

After termination, the clauses on intellectual property, the content licence, disclaimer, limitation of liability, indemnity and governing law continue to apply.

These terms may be updated. A new version takes effect when it is published on this page, and the "Last updated" date at the top changes with it.

For material changes affecting your rights we will show a prominent notice on the site. Continuing to use the site after a change takes effect means you accept the new version.

We do not keep a public archive of earlier versions. If you need the version as it stood on a given day, keep your own copy.

These terms are governed by and construed under the laws of Malaysia, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules.

For disputes arising out of these terms or the service, both sides will first try in good faith to resolve the matter by email. Failing that, the dispute goes to the courts of competent jurisdiction in Malaysia.

If any clause is held invalid or unenforceable, it is narrowed or severed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest remains in full force.

Language versions

These terms exist in several languages. For convenience, non-Chinese versions may be machine-assisted translations. If the versions differ or conflict, the Simplified Chinese version prevails.

For questions about these terms, or to raise a copyright complaint, an account issue or a data request:

• [email protected]

Please state the subject clearly (for example "Copyright", "Account deletion", "Data request") — it gets your mail sorted faster.