What We Collect
The privacy notice for RenewCity's optional play-data sharing. Last updated 1 October 2026.
RenewCity can share a small amount of anonymous information about how the game is played. It is off unless you turn it on, it is never tied to you or to your computer, and the game plays exactly the same way whichever you choose.
This page is the complete list. If it is not written here, it is not recorded.
Unlike some administrations, we publish our records.
Why we ask at all
One question: how far into the game do players actually get? A demo can be finished by its developer a hundred times and still lose everybody at the same unmarked corner. Knowing which quarter people reach, and which panel was open when they stopped, is the difference between fixing that corner and guessing at it.
What we record
- When a session starts and ends: platform, language, whether this is the demo, how long you played, the last quarter you reached.
- At the end of each quarter: the quarter number, the city, and your trust, cultural authenticity and budget as one of five broad bands — never the underlying numbers.
- Each action you enact: its id and category, the quarter, the gentrification stage, and what kind of block it landed on.
- Which tutorial steps you finished, and which you left.
- Whether you started Orientation, and whether you finished it, skipped it, or quit partway through — and at which step.
- Whether you reached an election night, and whether you won it. This is the one measurement the demo exists to take.
- Which Playbook pages you bought and which Backroom favors you called in, with the quarter and the running count.
- How a career ended: the outcome, how many quarters it lasted, and your Legacy Score as a band.
- Where you stopped: the quarter and which panel was open.
- Whether you clicked the wishlist button.
What we never record
- Nothing that identifies your machine: no hardware details, no serial numbers, no network address, no computer name.
- Nothing that identifies you: no Steam id, no name, no email.
- Nothing you type. Your mayor's name, your save names and your search terms stay on your machine.
- No exact metric values — only the five bands above, because five buckets answer our question and cannot single anybody out.
- Nothing is sold, shared with advertisers, or used to target you. There are no third-party analytics in this game.
Who you are to us
One random number, made on your machine the first time you said yes, stored beside your saves. If you turn sharing off it is deleted; if you turn it back on, a brand-new one is made — a return visit is a new stranger, not a returning one. It is not derived from anything about you or your computer.
With no connection, batches wait in a small capped file next to your saves and go out on a later launch. Turning sharing off deletes that file too, so nothing gathered under a consent you withdrew is kept.
Your IP address
Every request on the internet carries the address of the computer that made it. That is how a reply finds its way back, and no website can opt out of it. So it is worth being exact about the difference between what the network sees and what we keep.
Seen, briefly: when the game sends a batch, our hosting provider (Cloudflare) receives the connection and therefore sees the originating IP address, in the ordinary course of routing and of blocking abuse.
Stored by us: nothing. Our collector never reads the address, never writes it into a record, and never puts it in a log. There is no field for it in any stored file, and no log stream that retains one is switched on. An address is never joined to the random id above — doing that would turn an anonymous id into an identifying one, which is the exact thing this design exists to prevent.
Outside our control: Cloudflare keeps its own network-level records for security and abuse prevention, under its own privacy policy. Apart from the one setting below, we do not configure, receive, or query those records, and they are never connected to the game's data. We say so here rather than pretending the layer beneath us does not exist.
The one setting we do control: a rate limit at Cloudflare's edge, which stops floods of fake data before they reach our collector. When it blocks one, Cloudflare's security log records the blocked address for a short time, where the developer can see it in the Cloudflare dashboard. We never export that log or connect it to the game's data.
Where it goes, and for how long
Batches are stored as plain text files in Cloudflare R2 object storage, in a bucket only the developer can read. They are grouped by the date they arrived and by nothing else — the filenames contain no identifier of any kind.
Records are kept for 18 months and then deleted.
They are read by one offline script that counts how many players reached each stage. There is no dashboard, no third-party analytics service, and no account anywhere that holds this data.
Changing your mind
Settings → Privacy, at any time, in either direction. Turning it off deletes the random id and any batches still waiting to be sent. If you declined at first launch, you will not be asked again.
Getting your records removed
Write to privacy@renewcitygame.com. One person reads that mail: the developer.
Because the records hold nothing that identifies you, we need the one handle that does exist: the random id. The game shows it to you — Settings → Privacy → What We Collect, under "Who you are to us". Send that, and the matching records are deleted. Without it there is genuinely nothing to search for, which is a consequence of the design rather than an excuse.
The formal part
Some privacy laws, including the EU and UK GDPR, ask for these facts in so many words. Here they are.
- Who is responsible: RYCHO LLC, the developer of RenewCity, reachable at privacy@renewcitygame.com.
- Legal basis: your consent. Nothing is collected until you say yes, and you can withdraw it at any time in Settings → Privacy. Withdrawing does not affect what was lawfully sent before.
- Your rights: you can ask to see, correct or delete your records, or object to their use, by sending the random id as described above. You also have the right to complain to your data protection authority.
- Where it is stored: with Cloudflare, which may process it in the United States or other countries, under its data processing terms.
- No automated decisions: nothing about you is decided from this data. It only counts how far players get.
- Children: RenewCity is not made for children, and we do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 13. Because the records identify no one, there is nothing to single a child out by. A parent who wants their child's records removed can send the id the same way.
- Changes: if this list ever grows, the date at the top changes, and the game will ask again before sending anything new.