Since then we’ve hosted thousands of bundles, including the biggest bundles ever hosted.

Our bundle creation tool was originally designed to give the least possible surprises to participants. Once created, a bundle was locked and participants could only approve or deny. If any changes needed to be made an itch.io admin would need to be involved or the bundle would have to be recreated. This process was not designed for the wide range of sizes that bundles on itch.io can be, so today we’re launching our revamped bundle creation tools.

We hope you enjoy this update and I’m looking forward to all the new bundles to come.

Editing Updates

• Bundle drafts are now fully editable - Hosts can now fully edit all parts of the bundle’s content while in draft mode assuming no participants have approved it yet. No longer do you need to recreate a bundle if you forgot to add someone, or if you need to modify the splits. You can now work on your draft bundles to get them into the right state before sending them off to your participants to approve.
• The bundle split picker has been completely rebuilt - Gone is the very clunky whole number percentage slider. Bundle splits are now done by ratio, and can be accurate up to 2 decimal places. You can easily ensure that everyone’s portion is set to exactly what you want it to be, no matter how large the bundle is.
• Projects can be imported directly from jam or collection URLs - You can paste in the URL of a jam or collection to copy over all the contained projects. This feature perfectly complements our recommendation to use Jams as a means of having a bundle with open submissions. Run your jam, moderate the submissions, then paste in the jam link on the bundle creation page to get your bundle created.
• Project order can be explicitly specified - You can drag and drop the order of projects contained in the bundle when editing to ensure you get the desired presentation on your publicly facing bundle page.

Advanced Hosting tools

Too often we’ve seen someone assemble an impressive bundle, but at the last minute, one of the participants just isn’t responding. In our old system, the entire bundle would have had to be remade. That sucks. We’ve got some advanced tools to help hosts of larger bundles avoid no-shows ruining the entire bundle.

• Up to 15% of projects in a bundle can now be pruned if it will enable the bundle to become publish ready - Remove any participants that aren’t responding if they don’t make up a significant portion of your bundle. This is an opt-in field for bundle hosts. Participants are shown a notice about this when approving.
• It’s now possible to reset the participation of a partially approved bundle - If things aren’t going according to plan and a large percentage of participants just aren’t approving, you can now reset the participation of everyone so that you can edit the bundle’s contents and then send out the approval link again.

Other nice things

The bundle analytics page displays daily/weekly views graph. Additionally, on the top of the analytics page, you’ll find the total views your bundle has received.

Enjoy!

If you select “yes,” then your page will automatically receive the AI Generated tag.

Additionally, the following sub-tags are used for the content types:

• AI Generated Graphics
• AI Generated Sound
• AI Generated Text & Dialog
• AI Generated Code

For projects that select “no,” they will receive the tag No AI.

Note: It’s not necessary to use these “automatic” tags manually when classifying your page. We may rename or modify them to fit future classification needs, so please correctly fill out the disclosure form instead of manually tagging.

Required for Asset Creators

This field is now required for all asset creators on itch.io. If you have a public asset page on itch.io and you view your dashboard, you will now see a blocking dialog instructing you to classify your pages.

Screenshot...

Because we understand that some asset creators can have a large quantity of pages, we’ve included a bulk tagging tool to simplify the process of tagging assets.

Assets comprised of generative AI (even if modified afterwards) that are not tagged will no longer be eligible for indexing on our browse pages. You can review our quality guidelines here: /docs/creators/quality-guidelines#ai-disclosure

We’ll have a grace period for people to update their pages, then we’ll likely use user reports to handle pages that have not been addressed.

We’ve recently pushed out an update to all HTML5 games that adds a JavaScript based sitelock. If it detects a game from itch.io’s CDN is being loaded from a non-itch.io URL it will show a warning and provide a link to the itch.io page.

There are over 100k HTML5 games extracted to HTML on our servers. Although we tested as best we could, there’s still the potential that things break.

If you’re having an issue with the sitelock then please leave a reply here describing what’s happening, and include information about your setup/browser. If you run any browser extensions please try disabling them and trying again before reporting the issue (include the extension that caused a problem).

Our original implementation was built around setting a minimum pledge threshold, but unfortunately this created a lot of issues for people who use different currencies or are granted access in different ways. We’ve kept the minimum pledge threshold as a legacy option, but we’ve added two new ways to grant access to an itch.io page from a Patreon pledge.

New access settings

• Any paid membership - Anyone subscribed to a paid tier on your campaign gets access.

• Specific tiers - Pick one or more Patreon tiers that a patron must have to grant access.

• Minimum pledge amount - The old behavior, kept around for projects that already used it.

If you’ve already configured Patreon access on your page, then it’ll continue to function the same way, but you can go into your settings and refine how access is granted if desired.

Better membership checking

Access decisions now run on Patreon’s current API and look at the tiers a patron is entitled to, instead of trying to match a pledge amount.

• Gifted memberships now work - If someone was gifted a membership to your campaign, they’re entitled to a tier even though they never paid anything themselves.

• Cancelled but still paid through - A patron who cancels but is still inside their paid period keeps the access they paid for until it actually lapses.

• Free tiers are now supported - You can now grant access to those who have free tiers when selecting specific tiers.

• No more currency rejections - Tier-based access doesn’t compare amounts across currencies, avoiding previous linking issues due to currency differences.

Setting it up

Head to your project’s edit page and find the Patreon access in the Distribute tab. Connect your campaign if you haven’t already, pick how you want access granted. You may need to refresh your campaigns if tiers are not visible.

Enjoy

We’re making our experimental support for games that need SharedArrayBuffer available to everyone.

SharedArrayBuffer is a very useful JavaScript API that can enable game engines to be more efficient and provide more functionality. Sadly, due to the Spectre security vulnerability, support for this was disabled by default in 2018 on all major browsers. The functionality can be restored by opting in using special HTTP headers, but there are side effects from using these headers to ensure the page is more secure.

You can learn more here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/SharedArrayBuffer#security_requirements

Because of the side effects from enabling the headers, it’s not something we could just turn on for everyone, as we don’t want to risk breaking our site and the existing games we host.

For that reason, we’ve deployed a secondary CDN configuration that will be used for games that want to support SharedArrayBuffer. This may become the default configuration for new projects in the future, but for now it is opt-in.

You can enable it by going to the Embed Options section on your project’s edit page, under Frame Options you will find a checkbox for: SharedArrayBuffer support:

Changes

• The new CDN runs on the domain html.itch.zone. If you were implementing any kind of manual site locking using our CDN hostname, you will need to update your code. If you have plays with save games stored in local storage, they will no longer be able to access them due to the domain change.
• The header Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy: same-origin is added to all HTML files
• The header Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: require-corp is added to all files
• The header Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy: cross-origin is added to all files

Additionally, the embedding page on itch.io (your game page) will have the following changes:

• The header Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy: same-origin is added
• The header Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: credentialless is added

If you are using game embeds, the embedding page has the following changes:

• The header Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy: same-origin is added
• The header Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: require-corp is added

Note: We strongly recommend avoiding using our CDN URL directly to embed or view your game. Although it may work in some cases, there scenarios in which our sitelock may be applied and it will block the viewer from accessing the game (even if it works now, it may not work later). The only supported ways to play an HTML game hosted on our platform is either directly from the project’s page or using the Game Embed functionality.

Side effects

These headers put very strict restrictions on how cross-domain resources can be accessed. If your game accesses resources on other domains then those requests will fail by default. We highly recommend testing your game thoroughly with the browser console open to ensure there are no issues.

Additionally, there may be some bugs present on the itch.io page embedding your game. At the moment we are aware that any iframe embeds will not work (this includes things like YouTube videos in comments)

require-corp vs credentialless

The require-corp option is incredibly strict. It will prevent loading resources from other domains without very specific configuration. Chrome has currently deployed an alternate mode called credentialless that will enable pages to continue to load cross-domain resources from other domains while still allowing support for SharedArrayBuffer by limiting how credentials (cookies) are sent.

Learn more here: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/coep-credentialless-origin-trial/

We’ve decided to use credentialless on the itchio project page embedding your game to ensure that we don’t break the functionality of the page. This header is a compromise, though, as it currently isn’t supported in FireFox or other browsers. So in order to take advantage of games loading directly in your itchio page that use SharedArrayBuffer you will need to be on Chrome at the moment. Firefox is now running a trial to support this header, so no additional work is needed on your part for your Firefox players.

Note that the embedded content of your game is set to require-corp to ensure widest compatibility from the iframe layer.

Going forward we’ll aim for wider browser support. Either additional browsers will adopt the credentialless option or we’ll start changing how games are launched depending on the environment.

Supporting Both

You can deploy a game that conditionally supports SharedArrayBuffer by checking if it exists before attempting to use it.

You can use the following JavaScript:

if ("SharedArrayBuffer" in window) {
  // use code optimized for SharedArrayBuffer
} else {
  // use fallback
}

Combine this check with enabling the SharedArrayBuffer support from your project page to ensure that your game has the widest range of browser compatibility while being able to provide the best experience.

All iframes, with the exception of itch.io embeds, are now click-to-activate within project’s description, and other developer-provided fields. This is to prevent code on third-party pages from executing automatically when you navigating to someone’s itch.io page. We’ve seen scammers attempt to take advantage of how we treated iframes to initiate a download of malicious code automatically. Additionally, this change will prevent third-party services from automatically performing tracking without your consent. (Note, click-to-active iframes were already used in comments and community posts, this change now applies the same restrictions to the project pages themselves)

Outbound links are now highlighted when you hover over them. This is to make sure you aware you’re interacting with a link that leaves the platform. Images inside links are also highlighted. The goal here is to prevent someone from crafting page that shows images that appear to be itch.io UI elments but are actually links elsewhere. Additionally, in some circumstances, if we detect a particular link to be suspicious, you may receive a warning when you attempt to click on it.

We’re making these changes in response to the new wave of scammers we’re seeing attempting to distribute malware on itch.io. If you haven’t already, please review the the topic about the “try my game” scam.

If you have any questions or issues, please reply here.

We exercised a lot of care because we know there are a lot of jam hosts that depend on custom CSS to bring their pages to life. There’s more info for CSS users below, but we made a few critical markup changes and ran an automated migration script to migrate existing CSS files to the new format where we could.

For this update we migrated the theme editor UI to our standard theme editor UI that is already used for profile and project pages. We scanned through hundreds of jam pages with custom CSS to find patterns that we could expose directly in the theme editor so that regular accounts can access these customizations, and CSS users don’t have to write CSS to achieve some simple changes.

Part of this update is getting the jam’s markup and theme editor in a good place to add much more sophisticated design options in the future without having to depend on custom CSS. Consider this stage 1 in theme editor revamping.

Here’s what’s in this update:

New theme options

• Fonts! - You can now set a font family using the Google Fonts selector for the body text, and also apply a secondary font to headers on the page
• Font size - You can use a free range slider to adjust the text sizing across the page. We’ve found that many Google fonts can have different baseline sizes, so the font size slider will let you get the spacing you’re looking for
• Button color - optional color that can be set independently from the link color
• Header color - optional color that can be set independently from the regular text color
• Corner radius - You can apply rounded corners to the main content area
• Shadow presets - We added a few shadow presets for the main page container for basic shadows, outline or glow effects based on your theme’s colors
• Background image - Added size cover & contain options, added fixed position option
• Opacity slider on the main content area - Fade the background of the main content area so that your page background can show through

Copy and paste themes!

You can now copy your theme as a JSON text string, and paste it into other jams. This will enable hosts who do many recurring jams to quickly get their new jam page styled.

Note: This will not copy the images currently, it only copies all theme field values, CSS, and image properties. You will need to re-upload images.

CSS Guide updated for jams

We’re codifying some of the elements on the page for custom CSS users. We’ve added a new section outlining the jam page layout, with some considerations and recommendations: /docs/creators/css-guide#jam-page-layout

We’re currently experiencing issues with one of our legacy domains, itch.ovh. We’re in the process of trying to get the DNS restored, but we recommend that you update to the most recent version of our downloadable software to ensure that you are using our modern itch.zone domain for fetching app updates.

You may need to manually updated the itch app and butler to ensure you’re using the correct domain.

Today we’ve pushed out new versions of butler, and itch-setup to ensure any traces of the legacy domain are removed.

App Update Check

If your app version is 26.1.6 or above, then you will be able to automatically update.

Please click on “Preferences” and scroll down to “Advanced” and review the Components section to see what versions your app is currently using. Click “Check for updates” first to ensure that the app installs any pending updates.

As of this post, you should be on the following (or later):

• itch @ 26.1.9
• butler @ 15.23.0
• itch-setup @ 1.27.0

If your app is not updating as expected then you will need to manually update. You can head to /app and click Start Download to grab the latest version of the installer. Running the installer will force an update to the latest version of the app you already have installed without affecting any of your accounts or installed games.

Once updated, please go into “Preferences” to verify the version numbers.

Butler Update Check

If you’ve manually installed butler (you aren’t using the version that comes with the itch app), then you are responsible for updating it. Unfortunately the version check will fail on an old version of butler since it’s pointing to the legacy domain. You may see the following error when attempting to perform commands:

Version check failed: Get "https://broth.itch.ovh/butler/linux-amd64/LATEST": dial tcp: lookup broth.itch.ovh: no such host

Please download the latest version of butler from https://itchio.itch.io/butler and replace the binary.

Please verify your version number with the butler version command and verify you have a version built December 2024 or later.

If you have any issues with updating please post a reply here so that we can test further.

Syntax highlighting is performed client-side using the Prism library. We’ve exported the library with every single language it supports. You can activate syntax highlighting by having a pre tag with the class language-XXX on it (where XXX is the language you wish to highlight for.

local function hello_world()
  print("Hello world")
end

For markdown we support using the ```language syntax that is available on other platforms like GitHub.

For those using the rich text editor, you will have to manually edit the HTML to add the class at the time being.

Note: This is not yet available in comments yet, because we need to test compatibility with themed pages.

Most importantly, we’ve fully modernized our build and release infrastructure. All of our builds are now built, signed, and deployed through our new CI actions, with new signing certificates. This means we can start pushing app and butler updates on a regular basis again. Expect more frequent releases going forward.

You can read individual release notes here:

• itch v26.6.0
• butler v15.25.0
• itch-setup v1.29.0

Here’s a summary of what’s new:

Native Apple Silicon Support

The app now runs natively on arm64 macOS (Apple Silicon). The auto-updater will automatically pull the correct version for your system. All supplemental binaries (butler, itch-setup) will also be replaced with their arm64 equivalents automatically on update. The app should start faster, run faster, and have less impact on your battery since it no longer needs to run through emulation on modern macs.

Butler also now has native builds for Linux ARM64, and a Universal macOS build.

New OAuth Login

The default login method is now an OAuth flow that opens your browser to complete authentication. This replaces the in-app username & password login as the default. Password login remains available as a fallback. We’re making this change because password-based API login endpoints are frequent targets for credential stuffing attacks, and our attempt at a captcha to prevent attacks didn’t work reliably in Electron.

Assuming that the new OAuth flow works well, we will eventually remove password login entirely in a future release. If you have any issues with the new login flow, please let us know.

Electron & Build Updates

• Upgraded to Electron 25 (from Electron 22). We wanted to get this intermediate release out before we deploy the rest of the Electron updates. The kitch branch is already testing newer versions of Electron https://github.com/itchio/itch/releases/tag/v26.7.0-canary. Large bumps in Electron also raise the operating system minimum requirements, so we want to make sure we have a stable release checkpoints as we move to the latest version of Electron.
• 32-bit builds are fully retired
• Butler is now built with Go 1.24 with major dependency updates across the board.
• The itch installer now ships a AppImage binary for Linux

Accessibility

We did a pass over all clickable button like elements to ensure that they use semantic HTML elements to ensure that they can be navigated to and activated with a keyboard.

• Clickable elements now use semantic HTML (<button>, <a>) for keyboard navigation and screen reader support
• Modal dialogs use the native <dialog> element with proper focus trapping
• Icons have proper aria-label attributes for screen readers

Bug Fixes

• Set user agent fallback to avoid Cloudflare issues. We introduced Cloudflare late last year and it was causing issues with infinite human verification loops within the app’s browser. If you still are experiencing issues please tell us.
• Fix errors related to /register, /random, and other system pages generating incorrect URLs
• Fix context menus when clicking games
• Fix clipboard operations in the URL bar and login form
• Better support for AppImage and other bare Linux executables
• Various bug fixes

Other

• macOS uninstall support for itch-setup (--uninstall)
• Synchronized localization strings

How to Update

Your app should auto-update, but if you run into any issues you can grab the latest installer from /app. If you’ve manually installed butler, you can download the latest version from https://itchio.itch.io/butler.

If you have any issues with updating, feel free to post a reply here.

• You now have the ability to add GA4 measurement IDs to your pages, both on an account-wide basis and for individual projects.
  • See /user/settings/analytics for account wide third-party analytics settings
  • We’ve added a new page to your project’s dashboard under Interact where you can access third-party analytics settings for individual projects (previously this was located on the bottom of your project’s analytics page)
• GA4 measurement IDs are not currently active. However, you can add them in advance to prepare for the migration. They are now active
• itch.io will support only one version of Google Analytics at a time. Upon our code migration to GA4, we’ll exclusively use the GA4 embed code and measurement IDs.
  • The migration will take place in early July, 2023 Migration is Live. UA is no longer available
• After the migration, any remaining Google Analytics UA properties will no longer be embedded into your pages. If you haven’t updated your account settings then you will no longer receive analytics.
• To prevent any gaps in analytics, add your GA4 measurement ID now so it’s ready when we migrate.

If you have any questions about the migration, feel free to reply here.

I’ve locked this topic temporarily to avoid off topic discussion happening here. If you have issues or concerns you can contact support or if you want to have a more public discourse then I recommend creating a topic in General Discussion.

The UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) has introduced new regulations that affect how we handle pages on itch.io that contain adult content and themes. As of July 25, 2025, the OSA requires platforms to implement age verification systems to prevent minors from accessing adult content. This means we have had to implement geographic restrictions on project pages with NSFW or adult content for UK users.

At this time, we are not adding any invasive age verification systems to itch.io. Instead, we are exploring partnerships with third-party “digital ID” providers that would allow us to comply with the law while keeping the experience as smooth as possible for everyone. Until we find and implement a solution for age verification we are comfortable with, affected pages will not be available for visitors from the UK.

To help you understand how these changes may affect your pages, we have added a “Geo Restrictions” tab to the Distribute section of your project’s dashboard. This page will show you whether your project is restricted in the UK, explain the reason for the restriction, and detail what that means for your project’s availability there.

We use the tags you’ve added to your project page automatically apply a restriction in the UK. This is based on a combination of the “Has sensitive content” setting and the use of specific tags: “porn,” “adult,” “hentai,” “erotic,” and “sex”. Please note that a staff member may apply an override if we find your page is covered by the OSA but your tags do not reflect this. We may refine this list of tags as we manually review pages to ensure we can get an accurate classification of pages.

We may also review the comments and forum posts on your page and restrict access to your community pages separately if they contain a disproportionate amount of content that is not suitable under OSA. We are doing these reviews manually so if you are affected we will contact you about it. You can help avoid any issues by being proactive about moderating your communities and reporting bad faith actors.

We understand automated tag-based restrictions are not accurate. As we host millions of pages, our goal was to identify the majority of content initially then work with creators to refine restrictions on the individual page level. If you believe your game was incorrectly restricted, you can submit an appeal through the “Geo Restrictions” tab in your dashboard. A staff member will review your request to ensure we are adhering to both our policies and legal requirements while respecting your creative work. We will be sending out a mass email to creators that have had this restriction automatically applied to their pages so that they may review the restriction.

Our Position on the OSA

While we will always comply with legal requirements, we disagree with this policy’s approach. We believe these restrictions harm creative expression and make it harder for independent creators to reach their audiences.

If you share our concerns about the Online Safety Act’s impact on digital creativity and free expression, we encourage you to:

• Connect with local advocacy groups working on digital rights issues
• Review and consider signing this petition opposing the OSA’s implementation: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903
• Contact your local representatives to express your concerns

What about content I have purchased?

If you have previously purchased content that is now restricted in the UK, you will still be able to access your downloadable files through your library or the itch.io app. While the project page itself may not be viewable from the UK, your purchase history and download access remain unaffected by these geographic restrictions for the time being.

As itch.io is a DRM-free platform, we have always recommended that users download and store local backups of their purchases. This ensures you can access your content regardless of any future changes to itch.io or external circumstances that might affect our ability to operate.

You can now add links to your Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads accounts from your account settings page. These links will appear directly on your public profile page when you add them.

Bluesky Integration

Additionally, we’re now making it possible to use your itch.io subdomain as your Bluesky handle (here’s my page as an example @leafo.itch.io). You can set this up by assigning the generated decentralized identifier (DID) to your itch.io account from the BlueSky DID page in your account settings.

To set this up:

1. Go to the Bluesky settings page
2. Click “Change Handle” and select “I have my own domain”
3. Enter your itch.io subdomain (e.g. username.itch.io)
4. Choose “No DNS panel” when prompted
5. Copy the did:plc:... value and paste it here: /user/settings/bluesky
6. Click Verify Text File to confirm the username update

We’re trying a new experiment with this feature: It’s limited to accounts that have spent at least $10 on itch.io. Primarily this is to help prevent any funny business, but also we’d like to encourage you to buy some stuff on itch.io. 😎

Mastodon & Fediverse Improvements

If you provide a Mastodon account from your account settings page, a few additional enhancements will also take place:

• The link on your profile page will include the rel="me" attribute. This will allow you to add your itch.io profile link to your Mastodon profile page and it will get a green verified checkbox.

• The fediverse:creator metatag is inserted into game and blog post pages that you have authored. This will enable itch.io link embeds on Mastodon to show author attribution of your fediverse account. Learn more here: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/07/highlighting-journalism-on-mastodon/. You must opt-in to the domains that are eligible for attribution from Edit Profile > Public Profile > Verification (and scroll to the bottom, add itch.io and your own subdomain)

Payoneer is now available for all accounts that wish to receive payouts directly to their bank account. It has support for deposits directly into local bank accounts for many countries in the world. Payoneer is joining PayPal with the list of payout methods that are available to all accounts on itch.io.

As a reminder, itch.io has two methods of getting paid: “Direct to you,” and “Collected by itch.io and paid later.” This update is relevant to “Collected by itch.io and paid later”. We also call this system the “Payouts” system. You can learn more about payout methods here.

With Payoneer we can automate our backend for sending bank transfers. We will able to apply the same process that we do for existing PayPal payees. For those who have had to deal with delays from our old bank transfer system, we’re hoping this will eliminate all of those issues.

Our plan is to migrate any existing users who have been receiving bank transfers to Payoneer.

You can set up your account to use Payoneer from your Dashboard’s Payouts tab: /dashboard/payouts

Additionally, on the Payouts page you can now specify the destination when creating a new Payout. If you have existing payouts that need to be specified (because you have both Payoneer & PayPal connected), then you can contact our support team with the payout ID.

Lastly, Payoneer’s rates may be better for those who are receiving payments to accounts outside of the United States. PayPal’s max transfer fee is capped at $25 dollars, but Payoneer has a $3 transfer fee and then a withdawl fee (that can go up to 2%). Learn more about their fees.

Because we’ve just added Payoneer this week, we may have some initial delay in processing the first set of payments as we fill our Payoneer account with funds to represent the payouts we’ll be processing with them. Your patience is appreciated!

Thanks

As a reminder, our search system is about finding things by name or title. If you’re looking to browse by category, we recommend using our browse pages and filtering by tag.

Better Text Matching, Higher Performance

The new service we’re using has much better support for various types of queries, including different languages and typo tolerance. It should now match substrings from your query in various new ways to help you find what you’re looking for. Those trying to find your game should have a substantially easier time doing so.

The system is substantially more performant than our old one. For this reason, we’re able to start indexing more fields related to each project page and provide more ways to find and filter pages.

Filtering Added

We’re now indexing the page type (games, assets, tabletop, etc.) with every indexed page. You can filter by these from the top of the search results page. We’ll likely add more filtering options in the future, but for now, this should satisfy the biggest complaint we received about not being able to find a particular type of item by name. For example, searching for Game Assets with “Cave” in their name.

Updated Fields Indexed for Games

We’ve changed what fields from game and project pages are used for indexing. The following is the list of fields that may match a user’s query in order of precedence:

1. Title (including any title aliases set by a site admin)
2. Project URL (if different from the title)
3. Creator’s name and any contributor names
4. Short description or tagline

The biggest changes here are that all contributor names contribute to a result, and the short description can be used for search terms.

Because we’re now indexing pages by their author names, we’ve temporarily removed the account search functionality from the search results page. We may revisit this in the future.

Jam Search Added

We’re now indexing all jams that are eligible for display. The indexing eligibility is the same as the eligibility for the jam browsing pages: The page must be published, the “Unlisted” option must be unchecked on the jam edit page, and new jam hosts will require human approval for their first jams. Example search, find all the GitHub Game Off jams.

Jam results can be filtered by their status, e.g., in progress, finished, upcoming, etc.

The fields used to index a jam are:

1. Title
2. URL (if different from title)
3. Names of hosts
4. The short description

Backend Processing

Our new search service runs independently of our primary database. For this reason, we now asynchronously index pages when changes are made by the creators. There may be a small delay between when a page is updated and when and how it appears in search results. Keep this in mind if you’re trying to test your project’s visibility and you just made changes to the page. You may want to check back in an hour or so if you don’t see what you expect.

This tab collects information about visitors to your jam’s page, along with the referral information so you can get an idea of what websites are generating the most traffic for your jam.

Just like project analytics, you can graph data either weekly or daily, for any date range up to a year in length.

As this is a new analytics collection endpoint for us, data is only available from December 7, 2013 onward.

Please note that the referral data shown on the Analytics page may not fully represent the actual number of visits from different sites, browsers, and apps. Many platforms and technologies now employ measures that limit or omit the referral information for privacy and security reasons. Therefore, while useful, this data should be considered an estimation and may not comprehensively account for all sources of traffic.

Do you want to see more analytics for game jams? Tell us here and we’ll take it into consideration.

We’re now making it possible for anyone to post directly onto their account without the need to create a project first. This functionality has actually been available but hidden away for quite some time. We decided to open for everyone to see how people use it, if at all, and then plan how we’d like to expand it in the future.

This functionality is very much a work in progress, we’ll try to share more updates as we have them. Here’s what we have so far:

Posts dashboard

On your dashboard you’ll find a new tab, Posts, to access the new dashboard page. (Also linked from the account drop down menu in the header)

The new posts dashboard includes all posts you have authored, along with a quick summary of their stats. You can create a new top-level post on this page, or use the New devlog menu to jump directly to the appropriate page to start writing a devlog.

Keep in mind that this will only show posts that you have authored. If you have other team members writing devlogs for projects you control, you will still need to navigate to that project’s devlogs page to review those posts.

Game/jam/bundle mentions

For top-level posts, since they aren’t associated with a game page, they will be rendered using our default blogging template that you may have seen for some of our own blog blog posts.

The default template comes with a few additional features compared to devlogs:

• Including game/project URL will cause an additional section to appear that lists all games in the post, showing all the metadata and cover image for the game
  • If you mention only a single game by URL, it will get a special slot in the sidebar of the post, otherwise the games will appear on the bottom of the post in a grid
• You can mention a jam by URL to have it appear in the right column. (Note at this time only a single jam will be pulled out as a mention)
• You can mention any sales or bundles and they will be displayed with all their details alongside your post

Post type picker

The “Post type” picker is available for top-level posts with some slight adjustments: Since these are not devlogs, you now have two basic options: Blog and Announcement. All of the long-form options are the same. We feel that many of the long-form post types are much more appropriate for top-level blogging as opposed to devlogs, so we’re excited to see what people write.

Language picker

We’re introducing a language picker for both devlogs and top-level posts. In the future, as we explore more tools for discovery of posts, we think it would be helpful to know what language a post is in so we can filter it where necessary.

Caveats on discovery

This is a very early form of what we’d like to do with top-level posting. At this time there are a few limitations to be aware of.

Although Devlogs have their own directory page, nothing like that exists yet for top level posts yet. The only distribution we provide for now is sharing your posts to your followers’ feeds.

Spam review

We’ve changed our system on content review for posts/devlogs because features like these are really attractive to spammers. In the past if a post was flagged by our spam detector it would be sent to our internal queue for review, but the post would be fully functional. Now, if a post if flagged by our spam detector it will be fully blocked for view until a team member reviews it. We want to show to spammers up-front that their posts are blocked to discourage them from attempting at all. We apologize to any legitimate posters who may get caught in this review step.

In the sidebar, you can now filter projects based on the specific number of players supported:

Each game displayed will show the suggested player count range as provided by the developer:

Note that due to a bug with how our system asked for the player count, there are likely many multiplayer games that are currently missing player count information. Please allow some time to elapse for developers to update their pages accordingly.

For developers:

1. You can now set the minimum and maximum player counts on your ‘Metadata > Classification’ page, regardless of other classifications set. Previously, this was only visible for ‘local multiplayer’ games, which was likely due to a bug.
2. If you have classified your game as multiplayer via the Multiplayer classification or by using multiplayer tags such as multiplayer, local-multiplayer, etc. you will be prompted to add player counts on your dashboard above the project’s row.

Enjoy

We want to add more options for people browsing jams to filter by. I’ve gone ahead and pre-populated the tag editor with a few suggestions, but the tag input is free-form. You can type whatever tag you want.

We’re pushing this feature out first so people can start applying tags to their jams and we’ll then re-visit them the future to see what kinds of tags people are using. At the moment, there is no way to filter by these tags yet, or even view them on the jam’s page. These changes will come after more jams have had an opportunity to be tagged.

If you have previously hosted jams, feel free to go back and add tags to them.

Here’s the list of suggested tags that are included today:

• tabletop
• prize
• in-person
• beginner-friendly
• weekend
• bundle

Redundant information should not be included in tags, for example if your jam is ranked or not, as we already have separate filters for that.

If you have any suggestions please reply in this thread.

Note: Tags are only for description, they do not limit any functionality for the jams regarding who can submit and when. Tools for restricting submissions will come in a different update. It’s possible we may consider certain tags special to apply UI changes to a jam, but that is currently undecided.

We took several factors into consideration when designing this system:

• Search queries generally fall into one of two categories: “Topic” searches and “Direct match” searches, and we wanted to address both cases:
  • A “Topic” search is when a user is looking for a collection of content related to a specific topic. In our context, this means results that have a specific tag. We’ve made tags prominent in the autocomplete experience, hoping this will encourage users to directly explore tag pages, thereby discovering a broader range of content. We found that with our existing system, users would search for a tag (eg. “low-poly”) and be presented with a confusing set of results that contained the tag name in the title, and not pages that use that tag.
  • A “Direct match” search is when a user is seeking something specific, and they already know its name. Given that itch.io is an open publishing platform where anyone can create a page with any title at any time, we need to be cautious about incorrect results appearing when someone is searching for something specific. (We also want to prevent bad actors from using similar titles to popular works to capitalize on the traffic). To address this, we’ve decided to index only the top 1000 pages, along with any pages featured by our staff. This collection of pages is constantly updated. The autocomplete system will, in most cases, allow users to directly access the page they’re looking for, bypassing a full search results page that may display a large amount of unrelated content.
• Game jams: Our existing full results page doesn’t currently support finding game jams. While we plan to add this feature in the future, we thought it would be a good time to introduce a system to look up jams by title in the autocomplete search. (EDIT: Jam search results page is now available: /t/3818776/new-search-backend) Currently, we’re indexing any jams happening within a two-week window of the current date that have been approved by a moderator. We may expand this list as we gather more usage data.
• Performance: Each letter typed triggers a new query. To ensure the fastest response time without overloading our server, we generate a single index of autocomplete eligible content that is not personalized to the viewing user. Your account-specific content viewing settings do not apply. Pages are only eligible for indexing if they would ordinarily appear on our discovery pages, such as /games, without any special filters applied.
• Alternate spellings, usernames, etc.: Eligible pages for results are indexed in various ways to facilitate easier page discovery. For instance, in addition to the title, both Jams and Games are indexed by the author’s name, enabling you to find the page even if that’s the only information you possess. Tag pages may have tag aliases (e.g., “fnf” refers to Friday Night Funkin), so a search for “fnf” will still guide you to the relevant tag.

We hope you find this feature useful. If you have suggestions for other types of pages you’d like to see in the autocomplete results, please leave a comment. If your game doesn’t appear in the autocomplete results, don’t worry. The full search results page will always be available to help users find content that may not be suggested as they type.

Edit: As of November 22nd we are fully migrated to the new domains and CDN

Our current CDN provider is shutting down and we’ll me migrating to a new provider. This should not affect you in any way unless you distribute HTML/JavaScript games. We will be forced to change the default domain used to serve this content.

• The following domain will no longer be used for HTML games & projects: v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net
• The default domain for HTML games will be changed to html-classic.itch.zone
• The migration will happen in the next 90 days – we were recently notified of this update so we’ll post another update when we know the specific timeline.

Unfortunately, when we first launched HTML game support, we used a domain that was provisioned by our CDN. This came with some disadvantages, but we avoided changing it to prevent interruption to users. We are now being forced to switch away from this domain due to the change in providers. This may impact you in the following ways:

• If you used domain-based site locking for the domain v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net, your game will no longer work unless you add additional domains. Generally we recommend that if you use site locking, you allow the domain pattern *.itch.zone. Any new CDN configurations we provision will always use a subdomain on itch.zone.
• Games that used save game state within the browser will lose all their save data, as things like localStorage are tied to the domain of the executing JavaScript code – Unfortunately there is no way around this limitation. You will either need to provide a way to export and import save game data in your game, or you will need to integrate with a hosted API that provides save data storage

If you weren’t aware, for the past year we have provided a separate CDN configuration that serves your game through a domain we control, html.itch.zone. If you are already using this option then you will not be affected by this update. Learn more here: /t/2025776/experimental-sharedarraybuffer-support Note that due to changes in response headers, this domain has not been set as the default for new projects, it is currently opt-in.

If you have any questions you can reply in this thread

The Rating Queue is a special mode you can enable on ranked jams to help submissions reach a minimum number of votes in a fair manner. It works by requiring voters to rate from a random set of entries (default 5). Upon rating one of those entries, it will be swapped out with another random entry from the jam. This will prevent people from being able to directly rate a specific project, encouraging a fair distribution of ratings across all submissions to a jam. We strongly recommend using the Rating Queue for any jam where you want to collect public votes.

Additionally, there are now sections on Jam Guide regarding voting integrity with regards to Public and Contributors voting. Public voting is generally a bad idea, please read here for more information: /docs/creators/game-jams#jam-customization/ranked-jams/warning-about-public-voting

• Logs – Changes to the jam can be audited here, including when hosts perform actions, dates are changed, reports are calculated, and participants remove their games. This is a read-only view that can help you understand events related to your jam.
• Reports – User reports for project pages are made available to jam hosts so they can review submissions that might be in violation of the jam’s rules.

Report moderation

As a jam host, it’s your responsibility to determine how you moderate jam entries. User reports can help you identify rule-breaking entries should you need to remove them from the jam. Any newly created report is placed on the Pending list, where any jam host is able to see the report.

The following actions are available to take on each report:

• Dismiss – The report is moved out of the pending list, no other action is taken. You can review dismissed reports at a later time if action needs to be taken.
• Disqualify – The submission remains part of the jam but is disqualified. It will no longer display on the main submissions list and is no longer eligible for ratings and rankings. The submission page is still available by URL, and comments can still be left on the page. The submission can be re-qualified at a later time by a jam host.
• Ban Account – The submission is permanently removed from the jam. The submission page is deleted, including any comments. The account is banned from submitting any of their pages to the jam if the submission period is still active. If the account submitted any other entries to the jam, they are also removed. This operation cannot be undone.

Additionally, you can filter the reports by project, or search for reports by the URL of a project.

If you need to escalate a report to an itch.io admin, you can contact support with the report ID that is included next to each report.

If there are more moderation tools you would like to see, please leave a comment below.

One pain point with this system has been that after generating your keys, you would likely want to notify your backers. Because the import consists of a list of email addresses from an unverifiable source (CSV file), we don’t allow you to send an email to the backers unless you get explicit approval from our staff to prevent spammers from abusing our system. If you’re on a deadline, waiting for someone from our team to review your account may not be ideal.

We’ve launched a new system that allows you to use a backer access URL, which you can publicly share with all your backers, that will allow backers to claim access. Assuming they have an itch.io account with a verified email address that matches one of the emails you included in your import, they will be able to access their download key immediately.

More information here: /docs/creators/kickstarter#importing-by-csv/distributing-keys-by-url

Enjoy!

The old API we used to handle “Direct to you” payments has been closed off by PayPal for many years now. Although we were continuing to let people use it, recently we’ve been seeing more and more failures & issues with payments handled through it. Including issues like stuck payments, missing payment options, and instantly refunded payments. It’s been downright broken for many sellers. For this reason, we’ve integrated PayPal’s new Marketplaces API to allow you to continue to sell directly into your PayPal account. The legacy API may be fully closed down in the future so we’re asking all sellers to migrate to the new system if they are using the legacy PayPal integration.

In late 2017, we also disabled “Direct to you” for PayPal for all new accounts, leaving it available only for people who had already activated it. Starting today, all accounts can use “Direct to you” with PayPal once again!

Set up your payment processors here →

The requirements for using this new PayPal integration have changed, it is no longer possible to just type in a PayPal email address to receive payments. You must complete an onboarding process with PayPal, and it will most likely require you to have a business PayPal account (no longer, see below). There may also be regional restrictions. We’ve opened this thread so you can give feedback about the process, and tell us if you encounter any issues.

We’re still keeping the older system running during the transition phase if you are unable to migrate at this time, but please plan to migrate as soon as possible. If you continue to use the old system it’s very likely you will experience issues with payments failing, and the checkout flow is limited in a way that will negatively affect your conversion rate.

To close up, here’s a quick recap of the two payout modes itch.io supports:

• Direct to you – Each transaction is handled directly through your PayPal or Stripe account. You are the merchant of record
• Collected by itch.io, paid later – itch.io’s Stripe and PayPal accounts handle all transactions, you can request a payout to collect you earnings in bulk at a later time

Note: there are now two different ways to connect a PayPal account to itch.io for each of the payout methods. With “Direct” you are connecting to the new PayPal for Marketplaces system, with “Collected by itch.io” you are doing only a basic connection that reveals your account information but does nothing else.

Learn more about the payout modes →

Note 2: If you need to contact us about any private account information please use our support page.

Thanks