Creator partnership agreement

1 What this is

This is the agreement between Araneid Interactive ("the studio", "we") and you ("the partner", "you") for the creator partnership programme.

It applies to the titles you have been approved for, which are named in your dashboard and were named in the email that brought you here. It is not a blanket arrangement over everything the studio makes: a new release is added by us asking you and you agreeing, and you can ask to be added to one at any time. Nothing in the programme covers client work the studio does for other people, or internal tools that are not for sale.

It is a revenue-share arrangement and nothing more. It does not make you an employee, a contractor, an agent, or a legal partner of the studio, and neither side can enter into anything on the other's behalf.

2 The share

The studio pays you 20% of net revenue on every sale a storefront attributes to your link, for as long as it keeps attributing it. The rate is the same for every partner and for every title you are approved for — it does not vary with the size of your channel or with which game it is.

Net revenue means the proceeds the store actually pays us — the sale price less the store's commission and less any tax the store remits on our behalf.

Your share is not reduced by the studio's costs. Development, marketing, hosting, hardware and everything else come out of our side of the split. The only deduction is the store's own — which is why "net" here means the figure printed in the store's financial report, a document we can show you, rather than a number of our own making.

3 What gets attributed, and what cannot be

A sale is yours when the storefront tells us it is. We do not run our own tracking, set a cookie, or ask your audience to type a code — so what we can pay on is exactly what Apple and Google report to us, and nothing else.

On the Apple App Store, a first-time download counts only if it happens within 24 hours of the tap on your link, and if someone taps a different creator's link more recently, the credit goes to them. On Google Play there is no deadline: the tag rides along with the install whenever it happens.

Some sales cannot be attributed to anyone, and we would rather say so here than have you discover it from a statement. A sale made directly on our own site, on itch.io, or in a browser build carries no store attribution, so it earns nothing for either of us under this agreement.

Not every title will be a mobile one. Some are planned for PC, on Steam and on the Epic Games Store, and we expect to sell Steam keys for them directly from this site — in a way that can be credited to the partner whose link brought the buyer, which a direct sale cannot be today. None of that is live yet, so none of it is covered by the paragraphs above. When it is, this clause is rewritten to say exactly what counts on each storefront, you will be told before the new version takes effect, and your signature stands against the version you signed until then.

Apple does not report a campaign at all in a period where fewer than five users are involved, for its own privacy reasons. A month like that is shown to you as unreported rather than as zero, because those are different facts.

4 Payment

Balances are worked out monthly and paid once your balance passes $50 USD. Below that it rolls forward into the next period. It is never lost and it does not expire.

The studio covers the transfer fee. You are responsible for your own taxes, and for telling us if your tax position changes in a way that affects how we have to pay you.

Payment is arranged through an external service. This site stores a reference to that arrangement and never an account number, a card, or a tax form — see the privacy policy.

You will never be asked to give the studio your bank details. When a payment is due you are sent it through the payment service, and you enter your details with them directly — we do not see them, and they are never stored here.

5 Refunds and corrections

Stores report refunds and chargebacks in aggregate, in a later period than the sale. We cannot reverse an individual refund against an individual partner and will not pretend to: refunds are absorbed in the totals of the period they land in.

For the same reason a small part of each payout is held back briefly against later corrections, and released with the following payment. If a correction ever exceeds a balance, we write it off rather than invoice you.

6 What we ask of you

Disclose the partnership plainly, in the video or the stream itself and not only in a description. This is a legal requirement in most places and a decency requirement everywhere.

There is no minimum post count, no quota and no penalty for going quiet. Cover our work because you want to, or do not cover it.

Do not misrepresent what a game is or does to sell it, do not buy engagement, and do not place our titles alongside content that would embarrass either of us. We are not going to enumerate that further; if you have to check, ask.

7 Pre-release builds, if you receive one

This clause applies only to a partner who is sent a build before release, and only for the title it was sent for. Most partners never enter this tier, and nothing here applies to you unless you have accepted a build.

Nothing goes out before the release date — not a screenshot, not a clip, not a stream. Posting early ends the partnership and forfeits any unpaid balance. This is the one rule in this document with no flexibility in it, because a broken embargo cannot be taken back.

One public video on your own channel within three days of release. If plans change, tell us before the date. A rescheduled video is fine; silence is what ends it.

8 Your work stays yours

You own everything you make. This agreement gives the studio permission to link to it, quote a short passage from it, and share it on the studio's own channels with credit to you. Nothing more, and you can withdraw that permission for any specific piece by telling us.

We will never claim a video was made independently when it was made under this programme.

9 Using our material

You may use the key art, logos, screenshots and clips from the press kit to cover our titles, in the ordinary course of making videos or streams about them. That permission does not extend to merchandise, to re-uploading a game's assets as a standalone product, or to implying an endorsement beyond the fact of this partnership.

It ends when the partnership ends, except for material already published, which can stay up.

10 Ending it

Either side can end this at any time, for any reason, by saying so in writing. Anything already earned is still owed and is paid on the normal schedule.

The exceptions are the pre-release clause above and any case of fraud, where unpaid balances are forfeit.

11 Age, and a guardian's signature

You must be at least 13 to take part. Every platform this programme deals with sets 13 as its own minimum account age.

If you are under 18 when you sign, a parent or legal guardian must co-sign before the partnership becomes active and before anything is paid. They are agreeing to these terms alongside you, and the studio will correspond with them as well as with you while you are a minor.

A false statement about your age voids this agreement.

12 Your data

What the studio stores about a partner, why, and for how long, is set out in the privacy policy, and this agreement does not add to it. Your IP address is not stored at any point in this programme.

You can ask for your application and partner record to be deleted at any time. Where money has moved, the payment records have to be kept for as long as tax law requires, and we will say so rather than quietly keeping everything else with them.

13 Changes to these terms

The studio can change these terms. A change that alters what they mean gets a new version and a new date, and every active partner is told by email before it applies to them.

Your signature stays attached to the version you signed, which is recorded with a fingerprint of the exact text. If we ever disagree about what you agreed to, that record settles it rather than the current page.

14 Law, and disagreements

This agreement is governed by the laws of Ontario, Canada, and the courts of Ontario have jurisdiction over any dispute under it.

Before that: write to business@araneidinteractive.com. The studio is one person and almost everything is a misunderstanding that survives about one email.