Why Spellshooter 2 never asks you to sign in.

Open Spellshooter 2 and there is one green button: Play. No email field, no "continue with" buttons, no terms to scroll past. That is not an oversight or a feature we have not gotten to. It is a decision we made early and defended through every feature that tempted us to break it.

The record lives on the device

Your personal best, your stats, and your achievements are stored on your phone. The game reads and writes them locally. That means the first run works offline, in airplane mode, on a device with no app-store account signed in. It also means we hold nothing about you for the core game, so there is nothing to leak, sell, or lose.

Leaderboards without identities

The hard case was leaderboards. Players of the original asked for them, and a leaderboard needs some way to tell players apart. The obvious answer is an account. We chose the less obvious one: an anonymous player ID that the game generates on the device, plus a display name you pick yourself and a friend code you can hand to people you actually know.

Leaderboards are off until you turn them on. When you do, the game sends our backend the scores you submit, your chosen player name, your friend code, and that anonymous ID, which is exactly what it needs to display the boards and nothing more. Turn leaderboards off and none of it leaves the device. There is no email attached to any of it, so there is nothing to reset, recover, or phish.

Purchases without accounts

The Deluxe unlock and the Holiday Pack are handled by the App Store and Google Play. Your purchase is tied to your store account, not to us, which is why Restore Purchases works on a new device and why we never see a card number. We deliberately made Deluxe a one-time purchase rather than a subscription. Subscriptions want accounts; one-time unlocks do not.

What it costs us

Honesty requires admitting the trade-offs. Without accounts we cannot email you release notes, cannot recover a personal best if you delete the app, and cannot sync your stats between a phone and a tablet. Fair-play checks on the leaderboard have to work from the scores themselves rather than from a trusted identity. We think those are the right costs to pay for a game you can open and simply play.

The rule we apply everywhere

An account has to earn its place by doing something for you that cannot be done another way. In Spellshooter 2 nothing cleared that bar. Alpenkeep and Ampledger keep their data on the device by default for the same reason, and each will explain exactly what a sign-in buys you before asking for one. The full details of what each product collects are in our Privacy Policy, written to be read.