How to publish a Godot game on itch.io

Of the four places you can send a vbgnt game, itch.io is the only one the studio can finish for you. 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, and the studio's Publish pane pushes it there itself. The whole job is a page on itch.io and one click in the studio.

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. On itch.io, Dashboard, then Create new project. Note the URL slug it gives you: the part after itch.io/ is what the studio pushes to.
2. Set Kind of project to HTML. The default is Downloadable and it will not offer you a play button. Save the page as a draft; the upload comes from the studio.
3. Generate an API key at itch.io → Settings → API keys and paste it into the studio's settings under itch.io. It is stored once and can be removed at any time.
4. In the studio, open your game and switch the right-hand pane from Game to Publish. Tick Web, tick Push to itch.io, enter the target as yourname/your-game, and press Export.
5. A build machine exports the web build fresh from the project and pushes it to the page's html5 channel. Progress and the butler output show in the pane; a few minutes later the row reads Done.
6. Back on itch.io, open the project's edit page. Next to the upload the studio just pushed, tick This file will be played in the browser. This is set once and stays set for every later push.
7. Set the viewport to your game's resolution, tick Fullscreen button, and for a mobile-friendly game tick Mobile friendly.
8. Add a cover image at 630x500, a few screenshots, a short description and some tags. The studio's marketing kit makes all of these for you, sized and written for this exact form; see below. 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. If you would rather upload by hand, the Publish pane also gives you the web build as a downloadable zip with index.html at its root, which is exactly the shape itch.io's upload form wants.

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, and adding downloads

Every later release is the same click. Ask the studio for a change, wait for the build to land on your arcade, then press Export again in the Publish pane. Under the hood the studio runs butler, itch.io's command-line upload tool, against the same channel:

butler push build/web yourname/your-game:html5 --userversion 1.0.7

Each push is a versioned build, so players always get the current one and you can roll back from the page if a build turns out broken. The version number ticks up on its own with every export from the studio.

The pane also exports desktop and Android builds in the same run, and pushes each to its own channel: windows, mac, linux and android. itch.io reads the platform from the channel name, so the page grows download buttons for each without any further configuration. The itch.io desktop app installs the Mac build as-is, because the studio pushes the unpacked .app rather than a zip. For what each of those packages contains and what is and is not signed, see the export guide.

If you would rather run butler yourself, download the web zip from the Publish pane, run butler login once, and push the unzipped folder to the channel above. Nothing about the page cares which of the two did the pushing.

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. The marketing kit's cover is that art with the title set in the game's own font, checked to stay readable at 315x250, which is the size itch shows it at in some lists.
• 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.

Let the studio make the page

The build is one click. The page used to be the afternoon: a cover at the right size, screenshots that are not all of the title screen, a description, tags, and a dozen embed settings. The Marketing kit section further down the same Publish pane now does that part too. Tick itch.io, press Generate kit, and the agent plays the deployed game, captures it, and composes what the page needs:

• A 630x500 cover, a 960x400 banner for the page header and a muted 1920x1080 background for the theme, all built from the game's own key art and fonts.
• Five to eight 1920x1080 gameplay screenshots in upload order, and a few portrait ones if the game has a real portrait layout.
• A listing file with the title, a tagline under 120 characters, the description body in the plain-paragraph shape itch's editor keeps, up to ten tags, the answer to itch's generative AI question, and the five theme colours picked from the game's palette.
• The embed settings for this exact game: viewport size, fullscreen button on, mobile friendly on when it has touch controls, autoplay off so the first click unlocks audio, and SharedArrayBuffer off.

Every screenshot is a real capture of the playable build, and the copy only claims what the project contains: gamepad support if the input map binds one, touch controls because the studio wired them, online play only if the game has it. Browse the kit in the pane or download it as one zip, then work through the itch edit form with the listing file open beside it. The marketing kit post shows what comes out for three different games.

Give it a page of its own too

An itch page is a place a stranger can arrive at. The studio can also give the game a page that is yours: tick vbgnt page in the same kit, and once it finishes a Publish page button puts the game at games.vbgnt.com/p/ followed by its id, with the hero art, a trailer when the kit has one, a screenshot gallery, how to play, controls and a play-in-browser button. Paste the itch URL into the page's store links, or leave it blank and the page fills it from the itch target the Publish pane already knows, and the page grows an "Also on itch.io" link. Visitors who find the game on the games directory land on that page instead of straight into the game, which is the difference between a play count and a fan.

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.