Privacy Policy

1. Privacy at a Glance

General Information

The following information provides a simple overview of what happens to your personal data when you visit this website. Personal data is any data that can be used to identify you personally. For detailed information on the subject of data protection, please refer to our privacy policy listed below.

Data Collection on This Website

Who is responsible for data collection on this website?
Data processing on this website is carried out by the website operator. Their contact details can be found in the legal notice (Impressum) of this website.

How do we collect your data?
Some data is collected when you provide it to us directly — for example, data you enter into a contact form or registration form. Other data is collected automatically or with your consent when you visit the website through our IT systems. This includes primarily technical data (e.g. internet browser, operating system, or the time of the page request).

What do we use your data for?
Some data is collected to ensure error-free operation of the website. Other data may be used to analyze your user behavior.

2. Hosting and Data Controller

This website and the game servers, including the database holding your account and game data, are hosted by DeinServerHost (Christian Ralph Hennig), Grubenstr. 21, 66265 Heusweiler, Germany, on servers in Germany. Your data is not transferred to a third country for hosting. DeinServerHost processes this data only on our behalf and on our instructions, under a data processing agreement in accordance with Art. 28 GDPR. For more information, please refer to the DeinServerHost Privacy Policy.

The fonts used on this website are stored on our own server and delivered from there. No connection to Google or other font providers is made when you visit our pages.

3. Content Delivery and Security (Cloudflare)

Our website is delivered through the content delivery network and security service of Cloudflare, Inc., 101 Townsend St., San Francisco, CA 94107, USA ("Cloudflare"). All requests to our website — including from the game client — pass through Cloudflare's servers before reaching our host. Cloudflare caches static files such as images closer to you so they load faster, and filters attacks (e.g. DDoS attacks and malicious bots).

For this, Cloudflare processes the data your browser sends with every request: in particular your IP address, the requested page and time of the request, browser and operating system information (user agent) and the referring page. Cloudflare may set strictly necessary security cookies (e.g. __cf_bm) to tell humans from bots; these do not require consent under § 25(2) No. 2 TDDDG. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR — our legitimate interest in delivering the website quickly and reliably and in protecting it against attacks. Cloudflare processes this data on our behalf under a data processing agreement (Art. 28 GDPR).

Data may be transferred to and processed in the USA and other countries where Cloudflare operates servers. Cloudflare, Inc. is certified under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, on the basis of the European Commission's adequacy decision (Art. 45 GDPR); in addition, the EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR) are part of Cloudflare's data processing agreement. Details are in the Cloudflare Privacy Policy.

4. Registration and User Account

When you register on our website, we collect the data you provide (username, email address, password — stored as a salted hash, never in plain text). We also process the gameplay data your account generates (character stats, inventory, guild membership, chat and forum messages, and similar in-game state) in order to operate the game. This data is stored exclusively for the purpose of game management and player identification. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (performance of a contract).

We also temporarily process your IP address for rate-limiting and abuse prevention (e.g. to stop spam and brute-force login attempts). This is done on the basis of Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (legitimate interest in keeping the service secure and available) and is not stored permanently.

To enforce the limit of two accounts per player and to detect accounts used to pass items or currency to another, we store, with your account, the IP address it was registered from and a hashed (non-reversible) form of a random device identifier and of the IP addresses you log in from. The device identifier is a random value kept in your browser's local storage or the app's storage and in a strictly necessary cookie (pix_did, two years). It contains no information about you or your device. Only our staff can see which accounts share these values. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (legitimate interest in fair play and preventing abuse of the in-game economy); the data is deleted together with your account.

Your data will not be sold or passed on to third parties, except where described in this policy (payment processing, optional third-party login, hosting, content delivery, and analytics) or where required by law.

5. Third-Party Login (Discord, Google)

Discord

You may optionally link your account to Discord to sign in or to receive a Premium role in our Discord server. If you do, we receive and store your Discord ID, Discord username, and avatar from Discord, and — if provided by Discord — your email address. This data is used solely to authenticate you and to synchronize your Premium status with our Discord server. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR (your consent, given by initiating the link). You can unlink your Discord account at any time in your account settings or by contacting us. Discord's own processing of your data is described in the Discord Privacy Policy.

Sign in with Google

You can create an account or log in with your Google account ("Sign in with Google"), on our website and in our Android app. The provider is Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland. When you choose this option, Google sends us a signed confirmation of your login containing your Google account ID, your email address, whether Google has verified that address, your name and, if set, your profile picture URL. We store your Google account ID and the email address of your Google account to recognise you at future logins and to show the link in your account settings; a new account also uses that email address as its account email. Your name is only used once, to suggest a username, and your profile picture is not used or stored. We do not receive your Google password or access to any other Google data.

The purpose is logging you in to your account. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (performance of the contract for your user account). Using Sign in with Google is optional: you can always register and log in with a username and password instead, and you can unlink Google at any time in your account settings (after setting a password, so you can still log in). On our website, nothing is loaded from Google until you click "Sign in with Google". Only then is Google's sign-in button loaded from Google's servers, so Google processes data such as your IP address and browser information under its own responsibility and may transfer it to the USA (the EU–US Data Privacy Framework applies to Google LLC). So that you don't have to click twice next time, your browser's local storage remembers that you chose to load it (pixmmo_google_signin_opt_in); you can delete it at any time in your browser settings. Details are in the Google Privacy Policy.

6. Newsletter

If you opt in — via the optional checkbox when registering, the one-time question in the game, or the toggle in Settings → Notifications — we send you our newsletter by email with game updates, events and special offers (e.g. Store sales). Opting in is voluntary and never a condition for using PixMMO. The legal basis is your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR, § 7(2) No. 2 UWG). If you are under 16, you may only subscribe with the consent of a parent or guardian (Art. 8 GDPR).

We only send the newsletter to email addresses that have been verified through the confirmation link we email after registration, so no one can subscribe someone else's address. To be able to prove your consent (Art. 7(1) GDPR), we record when and how you subscribed or unsubscribed, the wording of the consent you gave, and the IP address used at that moment (legal basis: Art. 6(1)(c) and (f) GDPR). We do not track whether you open newsletters or click links in them.

You can withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future — via the unsubscribe link in every newsletter, the one-click unsubscribe of your email program, the toggle in Settings, or by emailing us. Your email address is then no longer used for the newsletter. The records of your opt-in and opt-out are kept for up to three years after you unsubscribe (the regular limitation period, § 195 BGB) so we can prove that emails we sent were covered by your consent, and then deleted.

Newsletters and all other emails are sent through our email service provider STRATO GmbH (Otto-Ostrowski-Straße 7, 10249 Berlin, Germany), which processes your email address on our behalf under a data processing agreement (Art. 28 GDPR). The data is processed in Germany.

7. Purchases and Payment Processing (PayPal, Stripe, Google Play)

If you purchase Gems or Premium status, the transaction is processed by the payment provider you choose at checkout: PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. et Cie, S.C.A., or Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd. (1 Grand Canal Street Lower, Grand Canal Dock, Dublin, D02 H210, Ireland) for card and other payment methods. We share the information necessary to process the payment (such as your username, the order amount and, for subscriptions paid through Stripe, your email address) with the chosen provider. The provider acts as an independent controller for the data it collects during checkout (e.g. your payment details) — we do not receive or store your full payment credentials. The legal basis for this processing is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (performance of a contract). Details on the providers' own data processing are available in the PayPal Privacy Statement and the Stripe Privacy Policy.

In our Android app, purchases are processed through Google Play Billing by Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland. Google handles the payment as an independent controller under its own terms; we only receive a purchase confirmation (product, order ID, purchase token, purchase and renewal status), which we check with Google to credit your account and keep subscriptions in sync. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR. Details are in the Google Privacy Policy.

For every purchase and subscription we store the order or subscription ID, product, price, payment status, the date and version of the waiver of your right of withdrawal you confirmed at checkout, and — for subscriptions — the billing interval, next billing date, renewal and failed-payment status. We also keep a history of changes to your Gem balance (purchases, rewards and spending) and a log of actions our staff take on your account (e.g. support corrections or refunds). The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (contract) and Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR (statutory retention obligations).

If you cancel a subscription through our cancellation page, we store the username and email addresses you enter, the type of cancellation, any reason you give for an extraordinary cancellation, and the date and time we received it, and we email you a confirmation (Art. 6(1)(b) and (c) GDPR, § 312k BGB). After each purchase, cancellation or failed payment we send you an email with the contract details, as required by § 312f BGB.

Records of completed transactions, the Gem balance history and the related staff log are kept for as long as German commercial and tax law requires (up to 10 years, §§ 147 AO, 257 HGB). Cancellation requests are kept for three years after the end of the year in which the contract ended (§§ 195, 199 BGB), so we can prove the cancellation, and then deleted.

8. Cookies, Local Storage and Consent

Our website stores small pieces of information on your device (cookies and browser storage). Strictly necessary ones are used without your consent (§ 25(2) No. 2 TDDDG; legal basis Art. 6(1)(b) and (f) GDPR): the session cookie that keeps you logged in, your language choice, your cookie-banner choice, and short-lived values in your browser tab's session storage that are deleted when you close the tab (see Section 10). You may disable cookies in your browser settings, but you will then not be able to stay logged in.

Everything else — Google Analytics (Section 9) and remembering which campaign link brought you to us (Section 10) — is only used if you click "Accept" in our cookie banner (consent under § 25(1) TDDDG and Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR). If you are logged in, we also record that you accepted and which version of the banner you saw. You can withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future using the button below; it deletes these cookies and shows the cookie banner again.

9. Google Analytics

With your consent, our website uses Google Analytics 4, a web analytics service of Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland ("Google"). Google Analytics helps us understand how visitors use our website (e.g. which pages are visited, how long, from which region and with which kind of device) so we can improve it. For this, Google Analytics sets cookies (_ga,_ga_<ID>, stored for up to 2 years) and processes usage data, device and browser information and your IP address. Google Analytics 4 does not log or store full IP addresses of users in the EU; they are only used to derive an approximate location and then discarded. Before any data is sent to Google, we remove secret values such as password-reset or login tokens from page addresses. Google Signals and the advertising features of Google Analytics (ad personalisation) are switched off, and we do not use Google Analytics data for advertising. Google Analytics is not used in our desktop app.

The legal basis is your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR, § 25(1) TDDDG), which you can withdraw at any time (see Section 8). Google processes this data on our behalf under a data processing agreement (Art. 28 GDPR). Data may be transferred to Google LLC in the USA; Google LLC is certified under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework (Art. 45 GDPR), and the EU Standard Contractual Clauses apply in addition. Analytics data linked to cookies is deleted automatically after the retention period set in our account, at most 14 months. Details are in the Google Privacy Policy and at Google Analytics: Safeguarding your data.

10. Our Own Anonymous Statistics

Independently of Google Analytics, our server counts page views to see how much our website is used. For each page view we store the page address (without parameters), the time, whether the request came from a bot (judged from the browser's user agent, which itself is not stored) and a random ID that your browser keeps in the tab's session storage, so reloads are not counted twice. That ID is deleted when you close the tab and is never linked to you or to other visits. For the first page of a visit we also store the domain of the website that referred you (e.g. a search engine) and campaign parameters in the link (e.g. utm_source). No IP address is stored.

If you arrive through one of our campaign links (?src=…), we also record the campaign and a pseudonymous visitor value calculated from your IP address and browser with a random key that is deleted after one day, so it cannot be linked across days or traced back to your IP address. If you register in the same browser tab, the campaign is stored with your account. Only if you have accepted cookies do we also remember the campaign for 30 days in a cookie and in your browser's local storage (pixmmo_src). Likewise, campaign parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) in a link to our registration page are stored with your account if you register, and kept for 30 days in a cookie and local storage (pixmmo_utm) only if you have accepted cookies. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in understanding which promotions bring new players (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR) and, for the 30-day cookie, your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR, § 25(1) TDDDG). You can object to this processing at any time (Art. 21 GDPR).

11. Data Retention

We retain your account data for as long as your account remains active. If you request deletion of your account, we delete or anonymize your personal data without undue delay, except for information we are required to retain for longer under statutory retention obligations (e.g. transaction records, see Section 7, and newsletter consent records, see Section 6) or to defend against legal claims.

12. Your Rights

Under the GDPR, you have the right to: access your personal data (Art. 15); rectify inaccurate data (Art. 16); request erasure of your data (Art. 17); restrict processing (Art. 18); receive your data in a portable format (Art. 20); and object to processing carried out on the basis of legitimate interest (Art. 21). Where processing is based on your consent, you may withdraw that consent at any time with effect for the future (Art. 7(3)). For any of these requests, please contact us using the details below.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority. The authority responsible for us is:
Landesbeauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit Nordrhein-Westfalen (LDI NRW)
Kavalleriestraße 2–4, 40213 Düsseldorf, Germany
www.ldi.nrw.de

13. Contact

If you have any questions about data protection, please contact us at: [email protected]