How RespawnStack checks AI tool pricing, commercial use, and license terms
RespawnStack is a directory of AI tools for game developers. The useful part is the ledger: pricing tiers, commercial-use rights, who owns the output, license caveats, whether Steam's AI disclosure is in play, and which export formats or engines the vendor actually names.
A fact is four fields: value, source URL, exact quote, and fetched date. Verified rows show the quote. Unverified rows say unverified and do not borrow a number from a blog post. The "Can I ship it?" panel is a summary of those rows. It is labeled as a summary so it is not mistaken for the quote.
Steam rows cite Valve's Content Survey, not the vendor. Pre-generated art, audio, and narrative that ships to players is what that survey asks about. Live-generated dialogue has an extra guardrail question. Code assistants used only for workflow efficiency are outside the section Valve says it is focused on. That is a reading of Steam's sentence, and the sentence is on the page.
Quotes go stale after 30 days. The verify-facts script re-downloads each source and checks that the quote is still there. refresh-pricing watches anchor sentences and the set of prices on the pricing URL, then appends a diff to the change tracker. Neither script calls a language model.
Some vendor sites answer a datacenter fetch with HTTP 403. Those tools stay on the ledger with unverified rows and the URL we tried. A failed download is reported as a fetch failure, not as proof the terms changed.
Questions
- Where do facts come from?
- From the vendor's own pricing, docs, or terms page, or from Steamworks documentation for the disclosure row. Each verified fact stores the URL, a verbatim quote, and the date it was fetched.
- What does verified mean?
- The quote is a contiguous string from that page's text. The checker strips HTML tags, decodes entities, and collapses whitespace, then looks for the quote. It does not ask a model whether the page 'still means' the same thing.
- What does unverified mean?
- We do not have a quote. The row stays 'unverified' until a fetch produces one. A blocked page is not filled in from memory or from a secondary writeup.
- When is a fact stale?
- A quote older than 30 days is stale even if it still appears on the page. Re-run verify-facts after a fresh fetch to move the date forward. The script also flags a mismatch when the quote is gone, and a fetch failure when the page cannot be downloaded. A fetch failure is not treated as a terms change.
- Is the Can I ship it summary legal advice?
- No. It is a short reading of the quotes on that page, with the caveats listed under it. The quotes are the record. The summary is not.
- Do you take tool submissions?
- No. v1 is filled by files in this repository. A nightly job can update them by committing. There is no submission form and no database.