Privacy Policy
What Couchpit does with your data. Spoiler: almost nothing.
Last updated: October 1, 2026
Short version: Couchpit has no telemetry, no analytics and no advertising, and it never sends your data to us or to anyone else. Everything it stores stays on your own PC. It does go online for a few things, all described below: to check with Steam that you own it, to show you as playing on Steam if you want, to download two public databases, and to check whether your graphics driver is up to date. The last three can each be turned off.
What Couchpit stores locally on your PC
Everything Couchpit stores lives in %APPDATA%\Couchpit\ on your own machine. None of it leaves your PC unless you choose to share it.
- User settings (
userSettings.json): your preferences and feature toggles. - Per-game profiles (
profiles.json): the games Couchpit has detected, with their per-game overrides and bindings. - Controller mappings (
controller-mappings.json): button layouts you set up for your controllers. - Play statistics (
sessionStats.json): how long and how often you played, shown inside the app. - Restore point (
restorePoint.json): a record of what the app changed in your system so it can revert cleanly on exit or after a crash. - Crash records (
sessionSentinel.json,crashHistory.json): whether the last session ended cleanly, so the app can undo its changes after a crash and tell you about it. - License files (
license.dat,steamtime.dat): an encrypted token that proves you activated Couchpit on this PC, and the last time Steam reported. See the activation section below. - Downloaded databases (
anticheats.json,gamecontrollerdb.txt): newer copies of the two public databases described below. - Logs (
Logs\): a diagnostic event log for your own troubleshooting. One file per day, at most 7 days kept. Can be turned off entirely in the Event Log tab ("Save to File").
License activation with Steam
When you launch Couchpit for the first time, it asks Steam whether your Steam account owns Couchpit. If yes, Couchpit creates a license token tied to this PC and stores it locally in license.dat.
The token includes a per-machine fingerprint generated from your motherboard serial number, CPU identifier, and Windows install GUID, hashed with SHA-256. The hash never leaves your PC: it is only used to encrypt the token so copying license.dat to a different machine cannot bypass the check.
Couchpit will re-contact Steam silently on a sliding 30-day window to keep the token fresh. If Steam is not reachable for 30+ days, the next launch will ask Steam again. This contact uses the Steamworks SDK and is bound by Steam's own privacy practices, which you can read here: store.steampowered.com/privacy_agreement.
Optional Steam integration
If you keep the "Steam integration" toggle on (Settings tab, on by default), Couchpit initializes the Steam SDK while it runs. This lets Steam show your friends that you are running Couchpit, the same way it shows them what games you are playing.
If you do not want that, turn the toggle off. With it off, Couchpit will not initialize the Steam SDK after activation, and Steam will not know you are running it.
Other connections Couchpit makes
Besides Steam, Couchpit downloads two public databases and checks your graphics driver. These are plain downloads from public servers: like any web request, the server sees your IP address, but no account, identifier or personal data of yours is sent, and nothing comes back to us. All three are on by default and each can be turned off.
- Anti-cheat database: the community list of games and their anti-cheat engines (AreWeAntiCheatYet, a public file on GitHub), so Couchpit can pause its controller features before a protected game starts. Downloaded when your PC starts, if "Update on system boot" is on in the Settings tab, and whenever you press "Check for updates" there.
- Controller database: the community database of controller mappings (SDL_GameControllerDB, a public file on GitHub), so new pads are recognized without an app update. Downloaded when your PC starts, if "Update on system boot" is on in the Gamepad tab, and whenever you press "Check for updates" there.
- Graphics driver check: if "Check on system boot" is on in the GPU Driver section of the Settings tab, Couchpit checks when your PC starts whether a newer driver exists for your graphics card, and you can also check by hand there. For NVIDIA cards it sends the card's model and your Windows version to NVIDIA's driver lookup, using a public list of NVIDIA models on GitHub. For AMD and Intel cards it reads their public driver download pages.
The update and driver checks that run when your PC starts only happen when Couchpit starts with Windows.
Bug reports
The Event Log tab can copy a support report to your clipboard, or open a draft email to support@gameeze.net in your own mail client, with your Couchpit version and recent log entries filled in. You can edit or remove anything before sending, and nothing is sent automatically. We only ever see what you explicitly send.
What Couchpit does not do
- No analytics or telemetry of any kind.
- No advertising. Couchpit shows zero ads, ever.
- No selling, renting, or sharing your data with third parties.
- No cloud sync. Your settings and game profiles stay on the PC you use.
- No collection of personal information beyond what is described above.
- No servers of ours. Couchpit has none to call: its only connections are the Steam checks and the downloads described above.
Your rights
You can:
- Delete all your local data by uninstalling Couchpit from Steam and deleting the
%APPDATA%\Couchpit\folder. - Disable Steam integration at any time from the Settings tab.
- Disable logging from the Event Log tab.
- Turn off the database updates and the driver check with the switches described above.
- Request information about what we know about you (in practice: an email address if you contacted support, and nothing else) by writing to support@gameeze.net.
- Ask for any support-thread email correspondence to be deleted via the same address.
If you are an EU resident, you have the rights granted by the GDPR (access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection). Email us at support@gameeze.net to exercise any of them.
Children
Couchpit is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect data from them. Steam itself sets the age policies for purchases.
Changes to this policy
If we change anything material in how Couchpit handles data, we will update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page and post a note on the Couchpit Steam community hub. We will not change the spirit of "no telemetry, no third-party sharing" without making that change very visible.
Contact
Gameeze, sole indie studio behind Couchpit.
Email: support@gameeze.net
Web: www.couchpit.app