How much does it cost to publish a game in 2026?

Publishing a game costs somewhere between nothing and $100 up front, depending on where it goes. itch.io, your own website and most web portals are free. Google Play is $25 once, Apple is $99 a year, and Steam and the Epic Games Store are $100 per game. After that, every store takes a share of what you sell, which ranges from nothing on your own site to 30% on the big stores.

Here is the whole table, the answers to the questions people ask most, and the costs that do not appear on any store's pricing page.

How much does it cost to publish a game?

Figures as of September 2026, in US dollars. Store fees change, so the links at the bottom go to each store's own page.

If you are making your first game, the honest reading of that table is that the up-front fees are the small number. The big one is the share of revenue, and the bigger one still is the time each store's review, testing and listing requirements take.

Does it cost $100 to put a free game on Steam?

Yes. The Steam Direct fee is $100 for every new app, and Valve's documentation lists no exemption for free games. The fee is recoupable, but only after the game has made $1,000 in adjusted gross revenue on Steam. A free game with nothing to buy inside it never makes that, so in practice the $100 is spent.

For a free game, that makes itch.io or a web portal the more natural first home, with Steam saved for when you have a wishlist to point at it. If Steam is the goal anyway, the steps from export to store page are in how to publish a Godot game on Steam, and what to tick on the AI disclosure is in can you sell an AI-generated game on Steam.

Can I publish my game for free?

Yes, in several places, and none of them is second-rate for a small game.

• itch.io costs nothing to use, takes whatever share you set (including zero), and accepts web builds that play right on the page. It is where most small games start. The steps are in how to publish a Godot game on itch.io.
• Newgrounds and Game Jolt are free to upload to and have communities that actually play new games.
• CrazyGames is free to submit to and takes games that are published elsewhere too, though a full launch comes with two months of browser exclusivity. Poki is by application and prefers a web-exclusive deal.
• The Microsoft Store dropped its registration fee for individual developers.
• Your own site. GitHub Pages hosts a web build free for a public repository, up to 1 GB. Netlify's free plan is capped at roughly 15 GB of transfer a month. Cloudflare Pages has no bandwidth cap, but it rejects any single file over 25 MiB, and a Godot 4 web build's engine file is bigger than that: the one in a typical vbgnt game is 43.7 MB. Check the limits against your build before you pick a host.

Every game made in the vbgnt studio is also published to your own arcade at yourname.vbgnt.com as part of the build, which is a link you can send rather than a store you have to be accepted into.

Where can I publish an HTML5 game?

An HTML5 game (a web build, in Godot's terms) has more homes than any other kind, because nothing has to be installed.

• itch.io, Newgrounds and Game Jolt: upload a zip with index.html at the top level and it plays in the page.
• Poki and CrazyGames: the two big ad-funded portals. Both pay a share of ad revenue and both review games before listing them.
• GameDistribution: syndicates your game to many smaller portals and splits the revenue three ways between itself, you and the site the game appears on. It requires its SDK in the build.
• Your own site or arcade: any static host, subject to the file-size limits above.

Kongregate, the name that comes up in older advice, stopped accepting new games in July 2020.

What does it cost to publish a mobile game?

Google Play is $25 once; the App Store is $99 a year for as long as you want the game listed. Apple waives the fee only for non-profits, schools and government bodies, never for individuals. Both stores take 15% of sales for small developers, and both have a real cost that is not money.

On Google Play, a new personal account has to run a closed test with at least 12 testers opted in continuously for 14 days before it can publish to production. On iOS, the build has to be exported from a Mac with Xcode installed. Both are covered step by step in publishing on Google Play and publishing on the App Store.

What costs are not on the pricing pages?

• Code signing for desktop builds. A Mac build that is not notarised gets a warning most people will not click through. Notarisation is included in the $99 Apple Developer Program. On Windows, an unsigned installer triggers SmartScreen; Microsoft's Artifact Signing (formerly Trusted Signing) costs about $9.99 a month, while a traditional code signing certificate runs $150 to $400 a year or more. Games sold through Steam or the Microsoft Store avoid most of this, because the store's own client handles the installation.
• A domain. About $10 to $15 a year if you want your own address for the game's page.
• Store art and a trailer. Every store wants capsule images at specific sizes, screenshots and usually a video. It is hours of work per store, which is why the studio's marketing kit produces them in one pass.
• Payment processing. Separate from the store's share on itch.io and your own site: around 30 cents and 2.9% per sale.
• Tax paperwork. Every store that pays you asks for tax forms before the first payout. It costs nothing but it will take an evening.

Where should a first game go?

Our suggestion, for a first small game: put a web build on itch.io and on your own page the same day, for nothing. Send the link to people. If they keep playing, the $25 for Google Play and the $100 for Steam are cheap tests of whether strangers will too, and one Godot project exports to all of them.