Guide:Distribution

Sites, tools, article, and any other resources to help you distribute your game.

Snags

• Apparantly if you're on Windows and trying to ZIP up a .APP folder for Mac users it can get messed up. There's a Python script here to do it properly though: https://gist.github.com/Draknek/3ce889860cea4f59838386a79cc11a85

Services

• Itch.io in kinda like Bandcamp for videogames. It's really easy to put stuff up and get stats on downloads, but you have more control over how your pages look. You have good control over how much and if you want people to pay for things too.
• Game Jolt is another popular distribution site, where you can upload games to be played online or downloaded.
• Glorious Trainwrecks is a small, friendly, encouraging community of people dedicated to ignoring principles of good design. They hold regular events: mostly super-short game jam events. It's the best.
• Internet Archive has built-in emulation for DOS and Windows 3.x games.

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• GOG ???
• Humble ???
• Steam charges you $100 to become a 'Steam Developer' — a one-tiem fee to enable you to put games on Steam Greenlight.

Space

Free

• Dropbox can be used to host pages, including Unity games. - Ability to serve HTML is about to be disabled :(
• Neocities provides fre web hosting. It's pricey if you want to use your own domain though. No WYSIWYG editor.
• Github can also be used to host pages, and domains can be linked for free.

Not free

Here are a few of the most reasonably-priced + reliable hosts

• Namecheap - easy to get coupons for.
• NearlyFreeSpeech.NET - only pay for what you use.
• Stablehosting - also easy to get coupons for.

Open-Source

Useful places for distributing Open-Source projects. You can of course also distribute the code in other ways, such as your own website.

• Git is a popular way to host, distribute, and contribute to codebases. Github is free and super popular, but there are some self-hosted options too such as Gitlab and Gitblit.

Payment

• The Humble Widget - Doodad you can stick on your site to handle taking payments.
• Itch widget
• Paypal and paypal.me (donations have to be done through '.me' I think now?)
• Crypto wallets?
• Patreon is the most popular service to collecting donations.
• Liberapay is a Patreon-like subscription service with better rates (it's funded through donations, not fees) and less shady practices.
• Kofi is for one-off / non-subscription payments.

Other Resources

Things beyond the scope of this wiki.

• dotoolkit.com - Home of some frameworks for writing presskits, contracts, and aiding distribution; if you're into that kinda thing. By Adriaan de Jongh and Rami Ismail.
  • vlambeer.com/toolkit is a related page, with links to the things above and more.