Legal
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These terms govern your use of SharkVault, operated by GameShark Labs LLC of Lutherville Timonium, Maryland. Using the site, creating an account, buying anything, or calling the API means you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use SharkVault.
They sit alongside our privacy notice, which explains what we collect and what you can ask us to do with it. If you have signed a separate written agreement with us, that agreement wins on anything it covers.
SharkVault is a reference archive for retro game enhancement codes, guides, and related media, with a free tier, paid membership tiers, one-time purchases, and a read API. We add to it and change it continuously. Nothing here is a promise that a particular game, guide, code, or feature will exist tomorrow.
You must be 13 or older to hold an account. You are responsible for what happens under yours, including keeping your sign-in address secure. Tell us at hello@gamesharklabs.com if you think someone else has access to it.
One account per person. You can close your account at any time from account settings; see Ending things below for what that does and does not delete.
Do not:
We can suspend or close an account that breaks these rules. Where the breach is minor and fixable, we will normally say something before we act.
Paid memberships are sold as monthly or annual subscriptions and renew automatically at the same price and interval until you cancel. The exact amount, the interval, and the cancellation route are shown before you pay, and you confirm them at checkout.
Cancel at any time from account settings, which opens the billing portal. Cancelling stops the next charge; your access runs to the end of the period you have already paid for. We do not require you to email or call anyone to cancel.
If we change the price of a subscription you already hold, we will tell you before the change takes effect and you will have the chance to cancel first.
If you are unhappy with a first subscription period, write to hello@gamesharklabs.com within 14 days of the charge and we will refund it. We do not normally refund renewals, because you have had the full period to decide, and we do not refund one-time purchases once the content has been delivered or downloaded.
This is what we offer voluntarily. It does not reduce any refund or cancellation right you have under the law where you live, and where those conflict, the law wins.
Some things are sold once rather than by subscription. Those give you a personal, non-transferable right to use what you bought. They do not renew, and access continues for as long as we run the service. Tips and other voluntary contributions are not purchases and buy no entitlement.
Payments are handled by Stripe. We never see or store your full card number.
You keep ownership of codes, corrections, notes, and other material you submit. By submitting it you give us a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to store it, publish it on SharkVault, edit it for accuracy and format, and include it in the archive and in exports of the archive, including through the API.
Only submit material you are entitled to submit. We may edit, decline or remove submissions. Removing your account does not automatically withdraw material already published in the archive; ask us at legal@gamesharklabs.com if you want something specific taken down.
The SharkVault software, design, original writing, and the selection and arrangement of the archive belong to GameShark Labs LLC. Game titles, box art, trademarks, and other third-party material belong to their respective owners and appear here for identification and reference. Our sourcing and attribution practice is set out on the attribution page.
If you believe something here infringes your copyright, our takedown procedure names our designated agent and explains what a notice needs to contain.
The read API requires a key. Keys are issued to you, are not transferable, and carry a rate limit and a scope that depend on the tier you were issued. Staying inside those limits is part of these terms; we can throttle or revoke a key that does not.
Data you retrieve through the API is licensed for use within your own product or research, with attribution to SharkVault. It is not licensed for redistribution as a competing dataset, and it is not licensed for training a model that reproduces the archive. Broader rights are available under a separate written agreement; write to hello@gamesharklabs.com.
We aim to keep SharkVault up and correct, but we do not promise an uptime figure, and we may take it down for maintenance or change how it works. If a paid feature is unavailable for a sustained period, write to us and we will sort out a credit or refund.
Enhancement codes modify game memory. They can corrupt saves, crash games, and behave differently across regions, revisions, emulators and hardware. We check what we can, but we cannot test every combination, and you use them at your own risk. Back up your saves.
Beyond that: SharkVault is provided as it is, without warranties of any kind, to the fullest extent the law allows. Some places do not allow warranties to be excluded, in which case this paragraph applies to you only as far as it legally can.
To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you for anything connected with SharkVault is capped at the greater of $100 or what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose. We are not liable for indirect or consequential losses, lost data, lost saves, or lost profits.
Nothing here limits liability that cannot legally be limited, including for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.
You can close your account at any time. We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, or stop offering the service entirely, in which case we will refund the unused part of any subscription you have paid for.
Closing an account removes your profile and sign-in. We keep purchase and entitlement records afterwards because tax and accounting rules require it; the privacy notice sets out how long we hold what.
We will update this page as the service changes, and the date at the top always reflects the current version. For a change that materially reduces your rights, we will give account holders at least 30 days’ notice by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use SharkVault after that means you accept the new version.
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Maryland, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Disputes go to the state or federal courts sitting in Maryland, and we each consent to those courts.
There is no arbitration clause and no class-action waiver here. Before filing anything, please write to legal@gamesharklabs.com. Most things are cheaper to fix than to litigate.
If you are a consumer somewhere that guarantees you the courts or the law of your own country, this section does not take that away.
If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Not enforcing something once does not waive it. You may not transfer your rights under these terms; we may transfer ours if the business is sold, and we will say so if that happens. These terms and the privacy notice are the whole agreement between us about SharkVault, unless we have signed something else with you.
GameShark Labs LLC, Lutherville Timonium, Maryland, USA.