Kongregate Royalty Terms and Conditions

can someone clarify this term of the “Kongregate Royalty Terms and Conditions” (Transaction-Related Disputes §2):

< You agree that we may recover from you any monetary loss to us on account
< of any decision by us to provide refunds or other compensation to users as a
< result of their purchases from you made with Kreds or any claims made by third
< parties arising from your products or services

im not a lawyer but to me this sounds ridiculous:
ANY monetary loss […] as a result of […] ANY claims made by third parties […].

I’m pretty sure it’s been added so that the Kongregate staff will have full power to undo any damage to save their own reputation of themselves and the kred system.

For instance, imagine that you sell certain items with kreds, but then you update your game making that permament item useless. This could harm the faith people have in the concept of using kreds ingame, so Kongregate might go in and say “people who bought this item will have their kreds refunded”.

I’m pretty sure they won’t use it to just randomly screw you over, that would hurt their position in the game portal market.

It’s “any monetary loss to Kong, from refunds, or from third party claims”. So you’re only in trouble if you false-sell things for Kreds (in which case you deserve the clawback) or if you manage to do something else which actively costs Kong money … which I currently can’t imagine how to do.

Thanks for your answers.
Yes I think I understand the intent of that section, but it’s wording is too general. As a result of that they may decide to give a user any kind of “other compensation” for a Kred purchase, and “recover” that loss from the developer. Also it is not stated under what conditions and for what reasons they may decide to give a refund.

Well I had some tips refunded from my game because the person who tipped fraudulently acquired those kreds. (IDK how, but he was banned for Kred fraud and 20 kreds were deducted.)

Originally posted by Drakim:

I’m pretty sure they won’t use it to just randomly screw you over, that would hurt their position in the game portal market.

Thats the key phrase. Its very difficult for a company to screw over a customer so out in the open, without repercussion to their rep.
Rep, is very important.

But I don’t like this either, because they could screw you over if they wanted to I think. They could instantiate more clauses and such to make it more specific, but than there might be unaccounted loopholes and ugh…. legal bullcrap.
In the long run more clauses could cause more trouble than whats already in existence, I think its favorable that it works the way that it does.

Indeed, but this is fairly standard, it’s not something special about Kongregate. Whenever you sign up for an MMO the company reserves the right to delete your account for any reason at all. One might protest that “so they can just delete my hard work because they didn’t like the way I put my pants on in the morning?!”. And yes they could.

The reason they give themselves ultimate power like that is because if they put restrictions on when they can refund themselves from your account, the sort of people who are actually pulling a fast one will try to fit themselves into the gaps in the legal wording, and it wastes a lot more time and money to recover money that really should be recovered.

The short answer is, if you don’t trust Kongregate, don’t post your game here, or at least don’t try to make a Kred-revenue game. But good luck finding a major portal which doesn’t have similar wording in its T/Cs. If you want to be completely free of having to trust someone’s judgement like this, you probably need to host the game yourself and take payment through a provider directly – and that is not easy to do in a profitable fashion.