Clean Play Standards 1.0: Mobile Games
Nine rules players can understand.
Nine tests developers can prepare for.
The standard is product-specific, evidence-based, time-limited, and stricter than a values statement.
No Disruptive Ads
Advertising must not interrupt play, track people, trick taps, or hold progress hostage.
No Tracking
The game must not profile, follow, fingerprint, or collect people beyond what is necessary for requested operation, security, or tightly limited diagnostics.
No Forced Accounts
Basic and offline play must not require unnecessary registration, email, profile creation, or social login.
No Loot Boxes
Money or purchased value must never lead to a random reward.
No FOMO Mechanics
The game must not use loss, punishment, false scarcity, or manufactured urgency to compel return visits or spending.
No Premium Currencies
Real-money prices must stay visible; purchasable gems, tokens, and odd bundles may not obscure cost.
No Pay-to-Win
Payment must not buy power, rank, competitive advantage, or relief from frustration deliberately engineered for sale.
No Hostile Notifications
Notifications must be useful, truthful, requested, easy to stop, and free of guilt or manufactured urgency.
No Hidden Subscriptions
Recurring price, cadence, trial conversion, renewal, management, and cancellation must be obvious and unobstructed.
Decision rule
No score. No tiers. No private waivers.
Every applicable requirement passes. A requirement is not applicable only when the feature is truly absent and cannot be activated by account, age, region, server, remote flag, experiment, or staged rollout during the term.
Companion guidance
Accessibility and child well-being matter.
Clean Play publishes companion guidance and specialist references, but Standard 1.0 does not falsely describe itself as an accessibility or child-safety certification.