Data & Content Licensing

What's in the archive

GameDev.net is a curated community platform covering game programming, graphics, design, audio, business, and related disciplines. The archive includes:

Tutorials — long-form technical articles, many peer-reviewed.
Forum discussions — more than two decades of threaded Q&A across every major game-development topic.
Developer blogs & devlogs — member-authored journals documenting real shipping projects.
Project showcases & portfolios — descriptions, screenshots, and postmortems.
Curated news — industry news with editorial selection and AI-generated summaries.

What requires a license

Under our Terms of Service § 4.6, the following uses require a written agreement regardless of how the content is accessed:

Training, fine-tuning, or continued pre-training of language, vision, or multimodal models.
Building embedding indexes or vector stores intended to power AI products.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) at scale, including "browse" or "research" agents that answer user queries by quoting our content.
Model evaluation, benchmarking, or red-team datasets that include our content.
Creating derivative datasets for redistribution, whether free or commercial.
Bulk export for archival, search indexing by non-search-engine products, or commercial research.

What does not require a license

Reading the site as a human visitor.
Traditional search-engine indexing (Google, Bing) that drives human traffic back to gamedev.net.
Human-written citations of a specific article with attribution and a source link, consistent with fair use and standard academic practice.
Individual students or researchers quoting a passage in a paper with proper attribution.

How the process works

Inquiry — email licensing@gamedev.net with a brief description of your company, intended use, rough volume, and timeline.
NDA & scoping call — we sign a mutual NDA and discuss which content areas you need and how you intend to use them.
Proposal — we send a written proposal covering scope, delivery format (bulk export, API access, or crawl allowlist), pricing, and term.
Agreement & delivery — on signature we provision access. Typical turnaround from inquiry to first delivery is 2–4 weeks.

Information that helps us respond quickly

When you reach out, please include whatever of the following you can share:

Company / institution name and a website.
Intended use (training a foundation model, RAG product, academic study, etc.).
Which content areas interest you (tutorials, forums, news, all of the above).
Approximate data volume needed.
Timeline for first access.
Whether the resulting model or product will be open-sourced, commercial, or internal.

FAQ

We already crawled GameDev.net. What happens now?

Please stop, delete the content from your training corpora and indexes, and contact licensing@gamedev.net to come into compliance. Prior unlicensed use does not create a license, and retention of unlicensed data is a continuing breach. We are generally willing to work with good-faith counterparties who come forward proactively.

Is Google Search a license?

No. Search-engine indexing that produces clickable results driving human visitors to gamedev.net is a different activity than training or grounding a generative model. Our robots.txt permits the former; ai.txt prohibits the latter without a license.

Do individual authors get paid?

Content is posted by community members under the user license described in Terms § 4.2, which allows GameDev.net to host, display, and make it available. Any revenue-share or royalty structure for community authors under a licensing deal will be handled separately and disclosed to affected users.

Can I license just one content type?

Yes — deals can be scoped to tutorials only, forums only, news only, or any combination. Pricing adjusts accordingly.

Do you license in perpetuity?

Typically no. Most agreements are time-limited (12–36 months) with renewal options, which allows both sides to revisit scope and pricing as the field evolves.

Machine-readable signals

For automated systems, our position is published at:

/robots.txt — crawler access rules.
/ai.txt — AI-specific usage policy (Spawning ai.txt spec).
/llms.txt — guidance for LLM agents.
/license.xml — machine-readable licensing terms (RSL 1.0), also declared via the License: directive in robots.txt and <link rel="license"> on every page.
<meta name="robots" content="noai, noimageai"> on all content pages.

Contact

Email: licensing@gamedev.net
Mail: GameDev.net, LLC — San Diego, CA — USA

GameDev.net reserves all rights not expressly granted, including rights under United States copyright law, the European Union Database Directive, and the United Kingdom Database Regulations.

Interested in licensing GameDev.net content? Let's talk.