Terms of Use

Agreement
Eligibility and age
Who operates Interurban
Account
What Interurban is
Licence
Editions, price, and payments
Acceptable use
Saves, rankings, and your content
Intellectual property
Advocacy donations
Third-party services
Disclaimer of warranties
Limitation of liability
Indemnity
Suspension and termination
Changes
Governing law; miscellaneous
Contact

1. Agreement

By creating an Interurban account, signing in, visiting playinterurban.com in order to use account or checkout services, buying Interurban, or running the Steam, Mac, or Windows application, you agree to these Terms of Use and to the Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not create an account, do not buy the full edition, and do not use the Services.

If you buy on Steam, Valve’s Steam Subscriber Agreement and Steam Refund Policy also apply to that purchase. Where those Steam terms conflict with this page on the purchase itself, Steam’s terms control that purchase. These Terms still govern the Interurban software, the Interurban account, and this website.

“Services” means the website, the account API, cloud saves and related account features, and the Interurban game builds we distribute (Steam, Mac, and Windows). “you” means the person who accepts these terms, or the parent or guardian who accepts them on behalf of a permitted minor.

2. Eligibility and age

You must be at least 16 years old to create an account or to use the Services. If you are old enough to use the Services but not old enough to form a binding contract where you live, a parent or guardian must accept these terms for you and is responsible for your use. We may refuse, suspend, or close an account that we reasonably believe was opened by someone under 16.

3. Who operates Interurban

There is no studio and no publisher named on About. Interurban is operated by an individual in the United States. This page does not invent a company name, a state of incorporation, or a street address that is not published on the site. Notices go to hello@playinterurban.com.

Streets.mn is an independent Minnesota non-profit. About this site records a debt of sensibility to their writing and notes that they have no involvement in this game. The link is not an endorsement by them, and they are not a party to these terms.

4. Account

An Interurban account is optional. The Steam, Mac, and Windows applications run without one: the binary is the licence, and nothing in the game asks you to sign in. An account is needed to buy Mac or Windows on this site — Square’s receipt and the installer download land on it — and it is what cloud saves, the career ladder, a public profile, friends, ratings, and a beta-code grant attach to. The applications offer the same sign-in as this website for those features, and only for those.

You may register with Google or with an e-mail and password. You must agree to these Terms and the Privacy Policy when you register (or, after a first Google sign-in, before the rest of the account proceeds). Keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for activity under your account. Write to hello@playinterurban.com if you think it was used without you.

Usernames are 3–20 characters: letters, digits, and underscores. We may refuse or reclaim a username that impersonates someone else, that is reserved, or that we cannot show on a public ranking. After the first free choice, a username may change every thirty days.

Steam still requires a Steam account if you buy or run the Steam build. That is Valve’s account, not an Interurban account, and a Steam purchase needs no Interurban account at all.

We may refuse registration, rate-limit sign-in, invalidate sessions, or close an account for the reasons in § 16. Closing the Interurban account does not, by itself, uninstall a binary you already paid for and have on disk, except where we must revoke access because of fraud, chargeback, or a legal demand.

5. What Interurban is

Interurban is a transit planning simulation: a game in which you plan rail and bus networks over census-backed metros and watch a four-step demand model answer you. It is sold as a Steam app and as native Mac and Windows desktop apps.

There is no hosted browser game. Nothing playable runs in this tab. Old links to /play/ land on play.html on purpose. The storefront says it in those words.

It is entertainment, not practice software. It will not tell you what happens at an intersection. It does not replace a traffic study, an environmental review, or professional advice. Census, GTFS, and other public data are used to build the simulation. Interurban is not affiliated with any transit agency, city, or data publisher, and using their data does not make them authors of the game.

6. Licence

Subject to these terms, we grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and run the Interurban build you are entitled to — free or full — on devices you own or control, for your own play. You do not buy the copyright in the game, the city packs, the mark, or the writing on this site.

On the packaged Mac, Windows, and Steam desktop builds, the binary is the licence for which edition that copy is (free or full). The account service records whether the account has been granted the full edition (purchase, or a temporary beta code). A website account cannot raise a free-stamped binary or lower a full-stamped one. Steam owns the Steam receipt for a Steam purchase.

You may not sell, rent, sublicense, or publicly host the packaged game; you may not redistribute city packs or a full-edition binary you did not pay for; and you may not strip, spoof, or circumvent the edition stamp in order to unlock the full game. The engine source, offered separately under the MIT licence in the public repository, is not this commercial licence and is not a substitute for buying the full edition.

We may provide patches, pack updates, and replacement builds. We do not promise that every future operating system, GPU, or storefront rule will keep running a copy you install today.

7. Editions, price, and payments

Full edition — $25 once

The full edition costs $25 once, the same sticker on Steam, Mac, and Windows. There is no subscription and no season pass. Future expansions that we describe on the storefront as included are included at no further charge. The full edition is every metro in the pack (seventy-nine as of these terms), eight decades, every mandate including the sandbox, every mode, no five-year clock, and offline play; the city packs ship inside the app.

Free edition

The free edition is the Steam demo or Interurban Free on Mac and Windows. It is one assignment at a time: this week’s metro under this week’s mandate, in 2025, for five years of game time. The assignment changes every Monday at 00:00 UTC. A run you have started stays on your device after the week rolls over; its clock still ends at five years. Locked metros, decades, and mandates are shown and labelled, not hidden. The simulation itself is not degraded.

Beta codes

During a private beta we may give testers a code that grants the full edition on a signed-in account without a Square charge. Codes are not published and are not available on request. A beta grant can be withdrawn when the beta ends, except that a copy you already paid for stays paid. A code is not a gift card, not transferable, and not redeemable for cash.

Payments and refunds

Direct Mac and Windows purchases are charged once through Square on buy.html, after sign-in and after the attribution survey. Steam purchases are charged by Valve. Taxes, currency conversion, and store fees are those of the store you used. Direct checkout asks where you heard about Interurban; that survey sits on the account until you pay.

Steam refunds follow Valve’s policy, through Steam. For a direct Mac or Windows purchase, write to hello@playinterurban.com. This page does not promise a particular refund window beyond what the law where you live already requires. Chargebacks we reasonably treat as fraud may lead to account closure and revocation of a full-edition grant on that account.

8. Acceptable use

Use the Services lawfully. You agree not to:

attack, scrape at a volume meant to disrupt, or overload playinterurban.com, the account API, or anyone else’s copy of the game;
create accounts by machine, share an account to evade a ban or a rate limit, or harvest other players’ data from honours or profiles;
circumvent the free edition’s weekly assignment, five-year clock, or locked catalogue except by obtaining the full edition as we offer it;
redistribute paid packs, a full-edition installer, or DRM-stripped or edition-spoofed builds;
pass the game off as professional planning advice, or as the work of a transit agency, Streets.mn, or any other organisation that is not the operator;
use the mark, screenshots, or copy to suggest an affiliation we have not given, except ordinary fair commentary and reviews of your own play;
upload or transmit malware, or content that is illegal where you live, through any account, cloud, rating, or support channel;
impersonate the operator, another player, or a public official.

We may suspend an account, refuse a purchase, invalidate sessions, or refuse a username that breaks this section.

9. Saves, rankings, and your content

Saves live on your device. Optional cloud sync copies those saves and career stats to the account service when you are signed in. Local saves remain yours to keep or delete on the device. The save format is versioned; surviving an update is a design commitment, not a warranty that every future build will open every past file.

If you post a username, a ranking, a rating, a survey answer, or other content through the Services, you grant the operator a worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable licence to host, display, moderate, and delete that content for the service. You still own it. You represent that you have the right to post it and that it does not violate these terms or the law. We may remove content without notice if we reasonably believe it breaks this agreement.

10. Intellectual property

Interurban, the lockup, the writing on this site, the city packs, and the packaged apps are the operator’s, except where a third-party licence already says otherwise (census and GTFS data, fonts, the MIT-licensed engine source, and similar). You may quote short passages and capture screenshots of your own play to review or discuss the game, with credit, in the ordinary way. You may not present the packs, the simulation, or the mark as yours, and you may not use them to train a commercial model in a way that competes with the game without permission.

Public data used to build metros remains public data. Using it in the game does not change the agencies’ rights and does not make those agencies authors of Interurban.

Feedback you send (bug reports, suggestions) may be used to operate and improve the Services without obligation to you.

11. Advocacy donations

These terms do not invent a new percentage. They repeat what about.html and buy.html already say, so a buyer is not promised a different tithe here than on the pages that sell the game.

Ten percent of every full-edition sale, on any store, goes to urban advocacy campaigns. Buy Mac or Windows direct and an extra 30% — the cut Valve would have taken on Steam — is donated as well: forty percent of a direct sale. Where the money went is published.

That is a public commitment about proceeds, not a trust, not a tax deduction for you, and not a partnership with any named coalition until a published report names one. A beta-code grant that is not paid does not create a donation obligation on a $0 receipt. If about.html or buy.html later change those figures, those pages control the current promise; this section follows them rather than freezing a different number.

12. Third-party services

Steam is Valve’s store. Square processes direct Mac and Windows payments. Google signs some accounts in. Cloudflare hosts the site and the account API. Resend sends mail. Their terms and privacy policies govern those services. An outage, a declined card, a store-page delay, or a mail-delivery failure at those vendors is theirs to run.

Links to Streets.mn, Instagram, TikTok, or anyone else are convenience and citation, not an agency relationship. We are not responsible for their content or their handling of data you give them.

13. Disclaimer of warranties

The Services are provided as is and as available. To the fullest extent the law allows, the operator disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, quiet enjoyment, and non-infringement, and any warranty arising out of course of dealing or usage of trade.

The model can be wrong. A beautiful line can carry eleven thousand people and cost two billion dollars in the simulation. That is the game, not a defect you can treat as professional advice. The operator does not warrant that the apps will be uninterrupted, error-free, free of harmful components, compatible with every future operating system, or that saves will always migrate. A crash or a missing pack is a restart or a reinstall, as the desktop host already tells you.

Some places do not allow implied warranties to be disclaimed. There, the disclaimer applies only as far as it lawfully can, and any implied warranty lasts only as long as the law requires.

14. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, the operator is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, lost goodwill, substitute software, or business interruption, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), strict liability, or otherwise, even if advised that they might happen, and even if a remedy fails of its essential purpose.

The operator’s total liability for all claims arising out of the Services is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you paid to the operator for the full edition in the twelve months before the claim, or (b) twenty-five US dollars if you paid the operator nothing. Steam purchases paid to Valve are not “paid to the operator” for this cap; Valve’s terms address Valve.

Some places do not allow these limits. There, they apply only as far as they lawfully can. Nothing here limits liability that the law says cannot be limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence where that bar is forbidden, or for fraud or wilful misconduct.

15. Indemnity

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the operator from claims, damages, losses, and reasonable legal fees arising out of your use of the Services, your content, your breach of these terms, or your violation of another person’s rights, except to the extent the operator caused the claim by wilful misconduct. We may assume exclusive defence of a claim; you will cooperate.

16. Suspension and termination

You may stop using Interurban at any time. Delete the apps, delete local saves, and delete the account in Settings or by writing to hello@playinterurban.com.

We may suspend or close an account, cut off website services, or refuse a grant if you break these terms, if a payment is reversed as fraud, if we have to stop running the site, or if the law requires it. We will try to say so at the e-mail on the account unless we reasonably believe notice would cause harm or is forbidden. Sections that by their nature should survive — licence limits on redistribution, IP, disclaimers, liability limits, indemnity, governing law — survive.

17. Changes

These terms may change. The date at the top and in § 19 will move when they do. If a change is material, a note on this page, a notice at sign-in, or an e-mail to an account you gave us is how you will hear. Keep using the Services after the date, and the new terms apply to that later use. A purchase you already completed stays under the terms that applied when you paid, except where the law requires the new terms to apply. If you decline a material change we ask you to accept, you may close the account.

18. Governing law; miscellaneous

These terms are governed by the laws of the United States and, as far as state law is required, the state law that a United States court of competent jurisdiction would apply to an individual operator who has not formed a company. This page does not name a state of incorporation, because there is not one.

You and the operator will try a genuine written exchange, at the address in § 19, before filing a claim. If that fails, courts of competent jurisdiction in the United States may hear it. If you are a consumer, mandatory protections in your country of residence still apply where they cannot be waived.

If a court strikes one sentence, the rest of these terms stay in force. These terms, with the Privacy Policy and the store terms of the store you actually used, are the whole agreement for Interurban. They replace prior website legal copy about the same subject. A failure to enforce a sentence once is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these terms without our consent; we may assign them in connection with a transfer of the project. Headings are for reading, not for interpretation. “Including” means including without limitation.

Nothing in these terms is a waiver of a right that cannot be waived. If we provide a translation, the English text controls if there is a conflict, except where a mandatory local law says otherwise.

19. Contact

Questions about these terms, a direct-purchase receipt, an account, or a deletion request: hello@playinterurban.com.

Get the game on Steam, Mac, and Windows. Read who built it on About. How information is handled: Privacy Policy.

Last updated 9 October 2026.

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