How to publish your vbgnt game on itch.io

Of the four places you can send a vbgnt game, itch.io is the only one that takes what the studio already produced. No native build, no signing, no review queue, no fee. The web build that runs on your arcade is the exact artifact itch.io hosts, so the whole job is a download, an upload, and a page.

Start here. If a store turns out to be worth the work later, the game will still be sitting on itch while you do it.

The ten-minute version

1. In the studio, open your game, go to the Files tab and download the project zip. Inside it, build/web/ is the exported game: an index.html plus its .wasm, .pck and .js files.
2. Zip the contents of build/web/ so that index.html sits at the root of the archive. Not the folder, the contents. This is the single most common mistake.
3. On itch.io, Dashboard, then Create new project.
4. Set Kind of project to HTML. The default is Downloadable and it will not offer you a play button.
5. Upload the zip and tick This file will be played in the browser.
6. Set the viewport to your game's resolution, tick Fullscreen button, and for a mobile-friendly game tick Mobile friendly.
7. Add a cover image at 630x500, a few screenshots, a short description and some tags. Save, then hit Publish.

That is the entire process. There is no review and no waiting period, so the page is live the moment you publish it.

The settings that actually matter

Viewport size

Set it to the resolution the game was designed at rather than something round. If the game letterboxes awkwardly in the embed, that is almost always a mismatch here rather than a bug in the build.

Mobile friendly

Worth ticking for any vbgnt game, because the studio wires touch controls into every game as a hard requirement. Most itch pages cannot say that, and a game that actually works on a phone gets played on a phone.

SharedArrayBuffer support

There is a checkbox for this, and it exists because multi-threaded WebAssembly needs cross-origin isolation headers. Leave it off unless you know your export is threaded. vbgnt builds default to the single-threaded export precisely to avoid this class of problem, so the box stays unticked and everything works.

Pricing

Free, donate, pay-what-you-want with a minimum, or a fixed price. The revenue share on itch is set by you rather than by the platform, with a default suggestion of 10%, which was the default in August 2026. For a game that took an afternoon, "free with a donate button" is the honest option and the one that gets played.

Uploading again without clicking through the page

Once you are iterating, the web upload form gets old. itch.io publishes butler, a small command-line tool that pushes builds directly:

butler login
butler push build/web yourname/your-game:html5

Each push is a versioned build, so players always get the current one and you can roll back if a build turns out broken. The channel name matters: tagging it as playable in the browser is done once from the game's edit page after the first push, and after that butler push is the whole deployment.

This pairs well with how the studio works. Ask for a change, download the new build, push it. The loop is short enough to keep.

Where itch fits against the other three

Read that table as a sequence rather than a menu. Ship to itch first because it costs nothing and takes minutes. If the game finds an audience there, that is your evidence that a $100 Steam fee or a two-week Play testing cycle is worth spending.

Making the page worth landing on

The page is doing more work than the build. A few things that reliably matter:

• The cover image is the whole first impression. Use the cover art the studio generated for the game rather than a screenshot of gameplay, which almost always reads as noise at thumbnail size.
• Say what the player does in the first sentence. Not the genre, the verb. "You can hold the lamp or use your hands, never both" beats "an atmospheric platformer".
• Tag honestly and specifically. Tags are how itch discovery actually works, and over-tagging gets you into lists where nobody was looking for your game.
• Say it runs in the browser. People filter for it, and the play-in-browser games get an order of magnitude more clicks than the ones asking for a download.

Two things to check before you publish

Audio needs a first tap. Browsers block audio until the user interacts with the page, so every web game needs a title screen or a press-to-start. vbgnt builds have one, but if you edited the project, make sure you did not remove it. A silent launch reads as broken.

Everything in it has to be yours. itch has no review queue, which means nothing catches an infringing asset before your players do. The studio steers briefs away from other people's characters for exactly this reason, but if you swapped assets in by hand, that check is now yours. See generative games and other people's intellectual property.

The honest read

itch.io will not make you money and will not put your game in front of a million people. What it does is remove every obstacle between finishing something and having a link you can send, which is the same thing your arcade does and for the same reason.

The difference is that an itch page is a place a stranger can arrive at. Your arcade is for the people you send it to. Both are worth having, and neither takes long enough to think hard about.