Commercial use of IGDB API

Continuing to use IGDB API Commercially

Recently Twitch bought IGDB. IGDB’s previous agreement with developers made it clear that they could use their API commercially. Now it simply says it is free for use under the terms of the Twitch Developer Service Agreement. This update doesn’t make it very clear if we can continue to use the IGDB API in a commercial product. There are a couple of statements that make it unclear. For example, in the Twitch Developer Agreement, it lists this as something you cannot do:

Using data collected from Twitch’s APIs to target end users with marketing material or commercial offers available off the Twitch Services.

It’s unclear exactly how this applies to the IGDB API. Does “end users” refer to Twitch’s end users or our end users? I know that some commercial use is acceptable, because it says this under the section about the embeddable player:

You can charge end users for access to Your Services that includes the embeddable player, but cannot levy fees specifically for the ability to watch or access a video.

My specific use case is that my end users are allowed to rate games retrieved by the API. Am I allowed to charge these users for other services my app offers and also have an ad system as part of my app (the ad system would NOT use data from Twitch/IGDB)?

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Hey Nick!

As a result of the acquisition, we (IGDB) have released our entire API under a single free tier (we essentially turned our old Pro tier into the free tier). When it comes to commercial use, you should be fine using our API as such currently. We will be releasing a community update regarding commercial specifics in the coming months as we are finalizing some policy details.

In the meantime if you want any direct help i’d suggest jumping into our Discord server. Our devs hangout there and we have a very active community of fellow API users who can help too. And sorry about the delay in answering, happy new years :slight_smile:

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Awesome, thanks a bunch! No worries about the delay.

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