Data licence

This file covers the dataset: data/** and the generated tables in games/**.

Source code, configuration, scripts and documentation are covered separately by the MIT licence in LICENSE. The split exists because code and data are different kinds of work with different constraints — MIT is a software licence and says nothing useful about a compilation of facts.

The licence

The dataset is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

You may share and adapt it, including commercially, provided you give appropriate credit, link to the licence, and say whether you made changes.

Suggested attribution:

Data from Steam F2P Tracker (github.com/poli0981/free-steam-games-list), CC BY 4.0.

What this licence does and does not cover

This is the important part, and it is easy to get wrong.

What the project can license. The selection, curation and arrangement of the catalogue, and the fields produced by this project's own work — the genre bucketing, type_game, safe, anti_cheat and is_kernel_ac judgements, notes, and the derived tables in games/**. That editorial effort is the project's contribution and is what CC BY 4.0 is being applied to.

What the project does NOT own, and therefore cannot license:

• description — the opening of the short blurb each publisher writes for its own Steam store page. Truncated to 180 characters, on a word boundary where one is available, with an ellipsis marking the cut. 2,156 of 3,426 rows (63%) were shortened; the rest were already under the cap and are stored whole. No stored value exceeds 180 characters. Before truncation the median was 213 characters and the longest 340 — long enough that the field reproduced whole blurbs rather than quoting from them, which is the practice this cap exists to end. What remains is a short identifying quotation so a row is recognisable; copyright remains with the publisher, and it is excluded from the CC BY grant.
• header_image — a URL pointing at publisher artwork hosted on Valve's CDN. The dataset contains the address, never the image. The artwork itself is the publisher's.
• Game names, and Steam's own tag vocabulary — names are trademarks of their respective owners and appear here nominatively, to identify the game.
• Anything reachable through link — that is Valve's page, not ours.

Facts are not owned by anyone. Player counts, review percentages, release dates, platform and language support are facts. The CC BY grant applies to this project's compilation of them, not to the underlying facts, which nobody can license to you.

EU database rights. Where a sui generis database right subsists in this compilation, it is licensed on the same CC BY 4.0 terms.

If you republish this data

Attribute the project, keep the caveats in docs/DISCLAIMER.md visible to your users, and do not present the derived fields as authoritative — genre, safe and the anti-cheat flags are one person's best effort, not an audit. Re-deriving description from Steam yourself is safer than inheriting it from here.

Not legal advice

This file was written by the maintainer, who is not a lawyer. It reflects a good-faith engineering judgement about what can honestly be licensed, made so that anyone reusing the data knows exactly where the boundaries are rather than finding a blanket MIT notice over material the project never owned. If you need certainty for a commercial use, get your own advice.