Data and privacy
Afterpatch is an independent project that watches how players receive game updates on Steam. No visitor sign-up, no ads, no tracking.
Where the data comes from
Public reviews and news of games on Steam. Afterpatch is not affiliated with Valve; Steam is a trademark of Valve Corporation, game names and covers belong to their owners.
Reviews are shown without author names or profiles. We don't store the author's Steam ID - only the review itself, its rating, language and the author's playtime.
What AI writes
Event analyses, weekly and monthly digests, review topics, short summaries and quote translations are written by a language model. Code checks the numbers in its texts against the data and quotes word for word against the reviews, otherwise a text isn't shown. Still, the model can misread things - treat it as an opinion, not a fact.
The model runs at an external provider; it receives review and news texts and numbers, but no visitor data.
What we know about visitors
- Only two cookies: your chosen language and a sign-in session for the site's account holders.
- Visits are counted without cookies, by a daily fingerprint of address and browser with a salt that lives for a day and then disappears. It can't link visits on different days or recover the address.
- Your IP address is kept in memory for an hour to a day - to limit overly frequent requests, password guessing and request stuffing.
- A request to add a game is stored with an address fingerprint (a hash with the site's secret key) - so each address counts once.
- Server logs - address, requested page, browser - are used for debugging and protection; their size is capped and old entries are overwritten within days to weeks.
- Your browser loads game covers straight from Steam's servers - Valve sees that request, as with any site showing Steam images. There are no other third-party scripts or fonts.
Rights
Code, design, site copy, analyses and digests - © 2026 Afterpatch, all rights reserved. Reviews belong to their authors; games, titles and cover art belong to their rights holders and are quoted and shown here to describe how players reacted.
Contact
Data error, request to remove a review or quote, rights holder question - write to: hello@afterpat.ch.
Updated: October 1, 2026.