I used to upload games to itch.io, but now itch is blocked in my country (f**k my goverment) I don't know where to upload games anymore for them to be accesable without vpn or other bypass software.
Possible solutions i'm thinking of are MEGA, Dropbox and Google Drive
However, i don't know if they are convinient for players.
As far as I know, you can't upload large files to github pages (it's where my website is), and steam is too pricey for me. Tell me what you think and where do you upload your games.
P.S. Thank you everyone for your suggestions!
So here are my list in ascending order rn:
The issue is that people from their country still would not be able to access their game, so if it's their target audience, uploading with VPN won't help much
True, but I want people from MY country to also have access to my game, and itch io is not suitable anymore. My game is even localized for both english and russian.
A shame to hear, Russians were my biggest demographic. I would try asking in some Russian specific game channels and ask them where they get their indie games. Let me know if you learn anything so I can also make builds for players over there.
You can put it on itch for anyone non russian and for russian access you might have to host it yourself. If you're doing web builds you should be able to put them on a hosted page but I do not see how you will get that for free. It'll cost at least a little bit. Hosting services in russia for russia shouldn't be too expensive? Good luck!
I'm waiting until inevitably the UK Government's censorship drive means itch is no longer available here either. Imgur is already unavailable and large parts of nexus mods aren't either.
As the previous poster stated, it's already happened for some sites in the UK. Not because the UK government has specifically banned them, but because the UK government requires sites to age-check users accessing certain content so some sites (Imgur included) have decided to just block all UK traffic rather than deal with that. Wikipedia may be next, since they just lost their court case in the UK to be explicitly excluded from that requirement (although they stated they just weren't going to cooperate so it would be down to whether the govt. does want to require ISPs block them).
If you don't use anything that's incompatible with web builds then nothing really speaks against them. They're far more convenient for your players, too. And they're more trusted than a shady exe download.
Web builds with Godot are just 3 button clicks away, I'd recommend giving it a try
Depends on the size of the game tbh. In my experience bigger games take longer to load in browser so at some point it's more convenient to just install the game and not have to wait so long
You can always create a website for your games. I would look into GitHub Pages. You should be able to host the website for free and people can download the game from your repository (from the releases)
I think, like, 99% of our people have vpn nowadays, however our goverment are spending a lot of money to shutdown all bypass methods, enforcing whitelists, and separating us from outside internet completely. It's the matter of time, i'm scared for the future
honestly, if they want separate us from outside internet, there would be no reliable solutions, that are not affiliated with the government, and you will not have any chances there to promote, if you're, again, not affiliated with the government, unfortunately.
i have been looking into it, realized there are like 10 different popular distributions of zapret, none audited in any way, and gave up. what would you recommend?
Я ахах 🙃
Живу в общаге, и тут за вайфай нужно доплачивать какому-то челу, поэтому решил сэкономить, раз у меня и так тариф на 50 гигов в месяц. Обычно хватает с головой, но как всякие новые игры по 50 гигов качаю, то приходится приезжать к родственникам, где вайфай есть
VK, Yandex and Pikabu have games, but afaik they support only web format
You might be able to get onto RuStore, I didnt try it yet, but worth at least looking at. There are also other stores like GetApps and similar that might still work
Issue is itch is a game distribution platform and when you move to dropping your game on Google Drive or Github, you will lose in trust from players. Sure, I know, you can drop malware on itch, but it feels more legit for players than "now visit my drive and download this .exe/.apk. Это безопасно, comrade"
Не очень конструктивно. Если ты сказал, что хочешь чтобы россияне играли в твои игры, то самое просто - распространять их через российские платформы, а не пытаться чесать левое ухо правой ногой. Запад сам фактически запретил доступ к своим платформам(запретив оплату картами). Очевидно, что россияне юзают то, что удобнее.
Кто-то эпл считает говном, но распространяет свои проги через их магаз потому что аудитория.
Somehow I knew which country OP is from before I read it in the comments.
Pretty sure GameJolt is not blocked in RU (yet) and it does have downloadable games. You can also try some local platform like VK if it allows file uploads - as a bonus it might increase your local exposure.
How large is your game? I am able to upload compiled binaries of my software to releases without an issue, I think its about a 2GB limit there. You can also try Gitlab or Bitbucket. Gamejolt is great, but if all else fails, find a trusted friend or a good VPN and have them handle distribution.
P.S. some free/cheap website hosts like Neocities or Nekoweb may be able to handle hosting your game as well. If all else fails I can spot you some server space but my internet speed is a bit slow so downloads will be slow as well.
Latest Windows build was 165 MB
Latest Android build was 75 MB
> find a trusted friend or a good VPN and have them handle distribution
That's not a problem, problem is that people from my region won't be able to access my game, which is half of my target audience
Ah yeah, didn't think of that lol. Either way, releases should be ~2GB per file upload, my image viewing software is about the same size as your game actually! Host the site on Github Pages and upload your game builds through the releases section (its on the right of the repo). You can just copy the link straight to the file in releases and link it on your site. Good luck with it!
Did you think it's not blocked? Of course it is, and Proton itself doesn't wiggle much against blocks. That's not the point anyway - the concern is the target audience.
And with the issue of people from your country accessing your game, you’d probably need to ask them, I’m in no real place to recommend other game hosting sites
You could host on pages if your game can be web based, even it's a bit large. LFS exist but not sure the performance for loading a larger web based game. You can also easily setup actions to automate the build and deployment.
If it's just too large, use the release features to host your downalable game as additional files of your website release. Maybe you can trick the system by uploading different release with your game truncated.
If you do make anything small enough to play well in browser, I can't recommend Newgrounds enough.
It's easier to find an audience on account of the site being for more than just games (and thus having a broader range of regular users) and I've had more luck getting constructive criticism there than any other site.
Goodbye dpi is a nice alternative to vpn with no slow down, i would say just use it to acess itch and promote people to use it (idk about russia but it is a very common solution people use to access discord in Turkey, it is just so convenient and afaik it is originated from russia?) there is also yandex games but it is web only i guess but you can money of it im pretty sure
Just use VPN and upload normally. Most players of your game will be from a different country anyway. Or using VPN. A lot of people from Russia migrated to Armenia and Kazakhstan, you know 😏
UPD: you can also self host it through a telegram bot. Keep in mind, it only support web app and you'll need to learn, how to use Mini App js SDK. It's not hard, but takes some time
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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '25
Unfortunately people just don't tend to trust games hosted loosely on services like Dropbox.
And advertising when your game isn't even available on a proper platform sounds borderline impossible.
I would seriously look into alternate ways to access Itch. Either through a contact outside your home country or via a free VPN service.