Software Licence & Entitlement Terms

This covers the software: the arcade console, the 27 games, the artwork, the music and the sound effects — everything running on the TV. The Party Package & Equipment Agreement covers the physical equipment. Where the two disagree about hardware, that one wins; where they disagree about software, this one does.

You are licensed the software, not sold it

Even when you own the hardware outright — a bought box, or a box you kept at the end of a rental — the software on it is licensed to you, not transferred. Bashcade, Inc. keeps ownership of the code, the art, the audio and the game designs. What you get is a permission to use them, and that permission is deliberately generous about the things families actually do.

What the licence lets you do

• Play, at home, as much as you like, with as many people as fit in the room. There is no per-guest charge and no session limit at a party.
• Install the console on any devices in your household, and move it between them. We apply a soft limit on simultaneous sessions to notice account sharing; it will never stop a party that is already running.
• Play with no internet connection, forever. See Your entitlement below.
• Record and post video of your own party, including the games on screen. Family footage is yours. This is not a commercial-use permission.

What it does not let you do

• Copy, extract, publish or redistribute the games, the artwork, the audio or the code — whether from a device, a download or a disk image.
• Rent, resell, sublicense or lend the software on its own, or run it as a paid service, at a venue, or at any event where admission is charged. Commercial use needs a separate agreement — write to us, we do them.
• Remove or alter the licence notices, the device identifier, or anything that marks a build as belonging to your order.
• Reverse engineer the software, except exactly as far as the law where you live says you may despite this clause — for interoperability, security research, or repair. We are not trying to override rights you cannot sign away.

Your entitlement

Your right to play is carried by a signed entitlement token issued to your order. It records which packs and features you bought and the window they run for, and it is checked on the device rather than by calling us. Three consequences worth stating plainly:

• It works offline. The token is fetched in advance, the games are cached in advance, and nothing about your party depends on the house Wi-Fi.
• A wrong clock will not lock you out. We allow a wide tolerance on the device’s time, and if the token is missing entirely, the code on the box unlocks the core games for a day so the party still happens.
• We do not watch you play. The console does not need to report anything to us in order to work, and it does not send us a record of your party.

Rentals: the licence runs with the pass

On a rental the licence lasts for your access window, plus any extension we grant, and then it stops. Returning the equipment ends it. If a rental converts to a purchase because the kit was not returned by day 21, the licence converts too — from that moment you hold the permanent licence described next, on the same terms as if you had bought it.

Bought and kept boxes: permanent means permanent

When you buy a box (Bashcade Box — bought) or convert a rental into one, the licence is permanent. Not “for the lifetime of the service”, not a subscription that stops when a card expires. Specifically:

• It does not renew, expire, or require a payment to continue.
• It covers every game and pack you own, including fixes and improvements to those games for as long as we ship them. Games and packs released after your purchase are sold separately and are not included. Themes built on someone else’s licensed characters are priced separately too, and we will say so before you buy one rather than after.
• You may transfer it once, free, to another person — boxes get resold, gifted, and split between households. Tell us and we will move it.
• We will not remotely disable a box you own. If you breach these terms we will take it up with you; we will not reach into your living room and switch the games off.

If we disappear

The honest risk of buying hardware from a young company is that the company stops existing. So the promise is written down rather than implied: if Bashcade, Inc. shuts down, your box keeps working. Every permanent-licence customer can download the console as a self-contained offline bundle that needs nothing from us, and we hold a source-available escrow commitment that releases the console source if we cease trading and nobody takes the product on. Your games are not hostages to our survival.

Updates

We ship improvements and new games, and you get them. We do not promise a schedule, and we may retire a game if we lose the right to a piece of music or art inside it — in which case we replace it rather than simply shrinking what you bought. An update will never reduce the packs or features your order recorded.

Other people’s work

The console is built on open-source software, and the type and audio are licensed. Those licences are honoured and their notices travel with the product; a current list of everything we include, with its licence, is available from help@bashcade.com on request.

Ending the licence

A rental licence ends with the window. A permanent licence ends only if you materially breach it — commercially redistributing the games, for instance — and only after we have told you what the problem is and given you a fair chance to stop. Ending it does not entitle us to anything on your hardware.

Questions

help@bashcade.com. If you want to use Bashcade somewhere this licence does not stretch to — a school, a library, a childcare centre, a business — ask. The answer is usually yes and the paperwork is short.