Privacy requirements

  • Games must adhere to the Google Privacy Policy.

  • Games must not make external calls to any URLs or services, except when required for compliance with other Technical Requirements.

  • Games must not attempt to bypass the restrictions placed on external calls.

  • Games are restricted from accessing the user's clipboard unless the user performs a direct paste action.

This section covers privacy and data requirements.

1 Policies

2 External access

These requirements pertain to the usage of third-party services.

3 External calls

  • Game MUST NOT make external calls to any URLs or services, except where explicitly required to comply with other Technical Requirements (i.e., to call APIs owned by Google or YouTube).
  • Game MUST NOT attempt to circumvent external call prevention.
  • Game MUST NOT generate or display graphical content resembling or functioning as a Quick Response ("QR") code.

4 User data

These requirements pertain to the access and handling of user data.

4.1 Clipboard

  • Game MUST NOT access the user's clipboard, unless it is in response to a player's explicit paste action.

4.2 Sensitive personal information

  • Playables content MUST NOT prompt the user to enter, or in any way collect, personal information. This includes, but is not limited to, the names, ages, locations, usernames, or passwords of users.
  • Playables content MUST NOT display any graphical content resembling or functioning as a login or account creation screen.

5 Obfuscation

Creators MUST NOT obfuscate code or conceal the functionality of the game. Minification is allowed, including the following forms:

  • Removal of whitespace, newlines, code comments, and block delimiters
  • Shortening of variable and function names
  • Collapsing files together

Direct transpilation of TypeScript to JavaScript is not in itself a violation of this requirement, unless additional obfuscation techniques are applied.

6 Code size and complexity

Games will be restricted to a total size or complexity of code (including the content of Script tags, JavaScript, WebAssembly, etc) that YouTube's tooling can scan and analyze. The maximum allowed size may change over time.

7 Language features

In its sole discretion, YouTube may decline to approve games it cannot evaluate for compliance with Google policies and other legal requirements due to use of language features such as:

  • WebAssembly (WASM)
  • eval()
  • Web workers

8 Single page applications

Playables MUST be implemented as Single Page Applications ("SPAs").