Privacy Policy

Last updated: November 2026 · Applies to our games and to minimumeffort.games

The short version

We collect as little as humanly possible, because handling your data sounds like a lot of effort. No analytics, no trackers, no ads, no selling anything to anyone. The rest of this page is the long version the law (quite reasonably) asks for.

Who is responsible

Minimum Effort is run by Roy van Laarhoven, a private individual in the Netherlands. Address: Muntsingel 40, 6075 GV Herkenbosch, Netherlands. Email: roy@minimumeffort.games. That's the "controller" in GDPR terms, and the person to email about anything on this page.

Our games

Our games do not collect, store, or transmit any personal data on their own. They run on your machine and mind their own business. If a future game ever needs something (say, online leaderboards), we'll update this page before it ships and say so in plain words.

Our games are distributed through stores such as Steam. Your purchase, your Steam account, and Steam features (achievements, cloud saves, leaderboards) are processed by the store operator (Valve Corporation for Steam) under its own privacy policy; we only see aggregated, anonymous statistics.

Bug reports

Some of our apps (Minimum Effort Clicker, for one) have a Bug report button. Nothing is sent until you press Send report, and you see the report first. It holds what you write, an e-mail address only if you give one, and the parts you choose: app and system details (app version, operating system, monitors and scaling, controllers, the main settings), the end of the app's log, a picture of the app's own window, and the current action list. Your user name, home folder and computer name are replaced with neutral words before anything leaves your computer. The report goes to our server at minimumeffort.games, which e-mails it to our bug inbox; the server keeps a copy for up to 90 days and, to stop spam, a scrambled form of your IP address for one hour. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in fixing the bugs you report (art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). We use reports only to fix problems and, if you gave an address, to ask you about it. Email us to have a report deleted sooner.

This website

The forum

If you register on our forum, we store what you give us: your email address, a display name, a password (stored hashed; we can't read it), your IP address at registration and posting (to fight spam), and whatever you post. Legal basis: performing the agreement with you to provide a forum account (art. 6(1)(b) GDPR), and our legitimate interest in keeping spam out (art. 6(1)(f)). We use your email only for account things like verification and password resets; no newsletters, no marketing. Your data stays as long as your account exists; email us and we'll delete your account and personal data. Your posts may remain in anonymized form so threads still make sense.

New registrations are checked against the StopForumSpam database (stopforumspam.com), which means the email address and IP address you register with are sent to that service to check whether they're known spam sources.

Email

If you email us, we keep the conversation as long as needed to deal with it, and then some, in case you write back. Legal basis: legitimate interest in answering you (art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

Who else sees your data

We don't sell, rent, trade, or "share with select partners" your data. We don't have partners. The parties that process data on our behalf are: our hosting provider Hostinger (website, forum and email hosting, under a data processing agreement) and StopForumSpam (spam checks at registration). YouTube (Google) only comes into it if you press play on a trailer, as described above. That's the whole list.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask us to: tell you what data we hold about you (access), correct it, delete it, restrict how we use it, hand it over in a portable format, or stop processing it (object). You can also withdraw any consent at any time. Email roy@minimumeffort.games and we'll sort it out; we'll respond with appropriate urgency, which for these requests means within a month at most.

If you think we've handled your data badly, you have the right to complain to the Dutch supervisory authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (https://www.autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl). We'd appreciate an email first so we can fix it, but that's your call.

Changes

If anything here changes, we'll update this page and the date at the top. We won't quietly start tracking you; that would take effort.