AGNow runs audiogames on its own computers and sends you the sound. It is run by one person with a small team of admins, not by a company. The games are other people's work and we neither wrote them nor vouch for them.
This page says who we are, what we keep, who can see it, what happens when you delete your account, and what we would do if we were broken into. There is a plainer page about how play time works if that is what you came for. Nothing here takes away rights you have under the law where you live.
AGNow is run by Bryn, with a small number of admins who help look after it. There is no company behind it. One person pays for the machines and answers the email, at bryn@brynify.me.
That is worth knowing before you decide what to trust it with. A service run by one person can be careful, and this one tries to be, but it has no legal department, no on-call team and no guarantee of continuity beyond one person's intent to keep it running.
Your game runs on our server, not on your computer. When you press Play we start a copy of the game in its own sandbox, with its own Windows environment and its own copy of the game's files. Nothing of another player's is in there.
Windows games run under Wine on Linux. The sound the game makes is encoded as Opus and streamed to you; your keystrokes travel the other way. What the game would say to NVDA is forwarded to the screen reader you already use, in your voice and at your speed. Nobody watches the window, because there is nobody at the server.
There are also relay computers, currently in Chicago and Frankfurt, which exist so people far from the main server can play with less delay. If you choose one, your saved data for that game is copied there while you play and brought back when you finish. Nothing of yours is left on a relay afterwards.
A few games download several gigabytes of sound for themselves. For those we keep one copy on the server that everybody playing shares, so nobody downloads it twice and it is not stored once per account.
There are no backups. If the disk fails, the accounts and everybody's saved games are gone. We would rather say that than let you find out. Your saved data for any game can be downloaded from the Saved data page, and if a game matters to you, that is worth doing.
An account is for one person. Do not share it: whoever is signed in can read your messages, open your saved games and spend your play time.
You can delete it yourself, at the bottom of Settings in the website or in any of the apps. See deleting your account below for exactly what that does.
We can suspend or remove an account that is being used to harass people, to get around a ban, or to attack the service.
This is the whole list, as plainly as it can be put.
Nothing here is sold, and nothing is given to anybody for advertising. There is no analytics service, no tracking pixel and no third party watching you use it. The only outside company involved is PayPal, and only when you pay.
Your password is stored as an scrypt hash with a random salt for your account alone. It is not encrypted, which would imply it can be decrypted. It cannot. We cannot tell you your password, only let you set a new one, and somebody who stole the database would have to attack each hash separately at considerable cost.
Staying signed in works by a long random token kept against your account. Those are stored as issued, so they are the one thing in the database that would be immediately useful to somebody who took a copy. Signing out everywhere drops them.
The service's own secrets, the keys for PayPal and for talking to the relays, are in files on the server. They are deliberately kept where a game cannot reach them: a game is somebody else's program running on our machine, and it is treated as such.
An admin, through the website or the apps, can see the list of accounts with their email addresses, whether each has confirmed its address, what is running now, and how much each game has been played. They can approve a new account, make somebody an admin or a developer, mute somebody from chat, sign an account out everywhere, stop its games, give it play time, and remove it.
There is no way for an admin to open your saved games, read your messages or listen to your recordings. No such screen or request exists in any of the apps, which is a deliberate limit and not an oversight.
What is true, and what no software limit can change, is that the person who runs the server can read any file on it. That includes your saved data, if they went looking. It is not done casually and it is sometimes necessary: putting a file into somebody's saved data to repair a broken game means touching that folder. If you would not want a file read by somebody with root on the machine, it should not be on somebody else's machine.
At the bottom of Settings. It takes your password again, because a session left open on somebody else's computer should not be enough to end an account with years of saved games in it.
When you confirm, in this order:
There are no backups, so this is final. There is nowhere else the data exists and nothing to restore it from. Download anything you want to keep first.
You are welcome to sign up again afterwards. It starts fresh, with no saved games and no play history. An account an admin removed is different: the saved data is kept on purpose, so the account can be put back if the removal was a mistake.
Messages you sent to other people stay in their conversations, because they are part of somebody else's record of a conversation they had. Your name on them becomes a deleted account.
We will tell everybody affected, by email to the address on the account and with a notice on the site, within 72 hours of knowing. We will say what was taken rather than that "some information may have been accessed", and we will sign every account out so that stolen tokens stop working.
What a copy of our database would and would not give somebody:
If it happens we will say what we got wrong. A notice that explains nothing is how people are left unable to judge their own risk.
We run games so people can play them. That is all it means. We did not write them, we do not speak for the people who did, and hosting a game is not an endorsement of it, of its author, or of anything either has said or done anywhere else. The same goes for mods and add-ons: offering one is not approval of it.
Some of these games are old, some are rough, and some contain things you may not like. We fix what stops a game running here. We do not change what a game is.
Anything between you and a game's developer is between you and them. A purchase you made with them, a licence key, a ban from their online game, an account on their server, a promise either of you made, a disagreement about any of it: AGNow is not a party to it and cannot help. We cannot get your key back, cannot lift their ban, cannot make them answer you, and cannot adjudicate who is right. Please do not ask us to, and please do not ask us to take sides.
If an online game identifies you to its developer, it does so by your AGNow account number and nothing else. We do not give them your name, your email address or anything else about you.
We can remove a game from AGNow at any time, for any reason, with no notice. Reasons that have come up or plainly will:
Your saved data for a game we remove is not deleted with it, and you can still download it from the Saved data page. Removing a game is not a refund event: nothing you paid for was that game.
A new account plays without any limit for its first 30 days. After that:
Watching or listening to somebody else's game is always free and never counts against your hours.
The clock runs while you are connected to your own game. If you walk away, close the app, or your connection drops, it stops. You are not charged for a game sitting there with nobody at the keyboard, and you are not charged for a connection you did not choose to lose.
Streaming a game from your own computer counts too. AGNow is still carrying the sound and your keystrokes, and it is still a session on our machines.
A game an admin has marked free to play costs nothing, and so does a game you uploaded yourself. Settings tells you how much you have played this month whatever kind of account you have.
When your free hours are nearly gone we say so: once with an hour left and again with ten minutes left. At zero the game is closed and your saved game is kept, exactly as if you had stopped it yourself.
Payments go through PayPal. We never see or hold your card details. You get an email receipt for every payment, which includes PayPal's own reference for it. Keep that if you ever need to query a charge.
Prices are in US dollars and include any tax PayPal collects on our behalf.
Cancel a subscription whenever you like, from your PayPal account. You keep unlimited play until the end of the period you have already paid for. Cancelling on the second day of a month does not take the other twenty-nine away, and cancelling a yearly subscription in March does not take the rest of the year away. After that your account goes back to the free 12 hours a month, and any hours you bought outright stay yours.
If you bought hours and have not used them, ask and we will refund them. If you have used some, we can refund what is left. Hours already played cannot be given back.
Subscriptions are not refunded part-way through a month or a year, because cancelling already leaves you with the time you paid for. If you were charged after cancelling, or charged twice, that is our mistake and we will refund it in full.
An account we suspend or remove for breaking the rules is not refunded. The subscription is cancelled so that nothing further is charged, and the month or year already paid for is not returned. If you think a suspension was wrong, say so and we will look at it again; that is a different conversation from a refund.
If something of ours broke and cost you your evening, a game that would not start or a session that died, tell us. We would rather put hours back on your account than argue about it.
Depending on where you live you may have a legal right to cancel a recent purchase of a digital service. Nothing here replaces that.
Your saved games are yours. They are kept for as long as you have an account, and you can download or clear any game's saved data yourself from the Saved data page.
Saved data cannot contain programs. We do not restore executables or scripts out of it, because that would be a way to run something nobody looked at. A game that updates itself by downloading a new program into its own folder will not keep that across sessions.
AGNow is a small service run on a handful of computers by one person and a few admins. It will sometimes be down. A game will sometimes break, often because the game itself was written for a Windows that no longer exists. We fix what we can.
We cannot promise a particular game will stay available, that the service will exist in a year, or that your saved games will survive a hardware failure. There are no backups. Download what you would miss.
If these terms change in a way that matters, the price, what the free tier includes, what happens to your saved games, who can see what, we will tell you inside AGNow before it takes effect. We will not quietly edit this page.
Email bryn@brynify.me for anything about billing, your account, privacy, or something you think we have got wrong. That is a real address and it reaches a person, which matters most for the case the in-app route cannot cover: somebody locked out of their own account.
For a game that is misbehaving, a message to an admin from inside AGNow usually gets there faster.