Hi all,
New member, just having a look around. One thing I noticed is a lot of the games seem to nearly always be hosted on itch.io, which got me wondering if there were any alternative places that writers publish their too?
It’s a bit like how it’s hard to think of an alternative to YouTube, but they do exist 
the best alternative, by far, remains the IF archive.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
Oh, I guess I’ve just not clicked enough stories on IF archive, because all the ones I tried had linked out to itch.io - but I get what you mean.
There are plenty of itch.io alternatives, although itch.io and IF Archive are the ones generally used by this community. You’ll notice older games on IFDB generally have IF Archive links, while newer ones tend to use Itch. But there’s also Newgrounds, where account creation is just as easy as Itch account creation, though Newgrounds only hosts web-compatible game and doesn’t allow downloaded files.
Newgrounds is a very old site, but it’s still alive and kicking. It hosts games, art, and animations. It does have a policy where games have to be “approved” before you can see comments and ratings on them, typically through a few older members playing through and rating the game to confirm it’s not spam. It takes a few days, but it’s not much of a barrier to hosting. I think Newgrounds isn’t as popular here because Itch has the “game jam” feature that a lot of newer jams and comps now rely on, but that’s just a guess. There are a few IF games hosted on Newgrounds, like Missed Messages (IFDB link).
If you’re a bit techier, there’s Neocities and Github Pages. Any web-based game that doesn’t rely on sound can be hosted on Neocities. You can’t put audio or video files onto your Neocities website without becoming a paying member. Actually, Neocities limits the types of files you can upload to your site if you’re a free member, which makes it very impractical to try hosting downloadable IF games on your Neocities site. The full list of allowed filetypes is here. Social Democracy: An Alternate History (IFDB link) and the other Social Democracy games are mirrored on Neocities.
Github Pages has no filetype restrictions but is slightly more complicated to set up than Neocities. On the other hand, any web-based game or downloadable file can be hosted on Github Pages. These two platforms generally come with less discoverability, so you’ll have to spread things through word-of-mouth. Though that applies to all these sites anyway. Biennio Rosso, a Social Democracy fangame (IFDB link), is hosted on Github Pages. So is Nyoperativsystem (IFDB link), and probably a lot of other obscure games I haven’t played.
There’s also Gamejolt, for downloadable games, although I haven’t used it before. When I checked in on it, it seemed to mainly be known for Undertale fan games and the like (Undertale Yellow is hosted on there for free. Very fun game), but there’s no reason why you couldn’t put your own downloadable files on there. I’m not aware of any IF games hosted on Gamejolt, but maybe some exist.
Steam is the nuclear option, but since this is a hobbyist community and I believe the fee for putting a game on Steam is a hundred dollars, it’s not used for many games. But there are some large ones, like Hadean Lands (IFDB link), that have Steam listings.
The last resort is to just purchase your own domain and make your own website. A lot of popular web games and IF like A Dark Room (IFDB link) do this.
Those are all the big options I’m familiar with. There are definitely other various hosting sites out there, though. And a lot of older ones like philome.la that are no longer accepting new submissions.
You’ll notice a lot of the games I linked here are hosted in multiple places. Missed Messages is on Itch, and Newgrounds, and Steam. This is the best way to maximize discoverability, and it provides backups if one of those sites goes down, so I’d recommend it.
The IF Archive is the largest, and oldest repository of interactive fiction on the internet, but it’s not meant to be a “storefront” like itch.io. If you’re looking for a place to upload your game to, it’s a great choice, but nobody is likely to find it unless you also create an entry on the Interactive Fiction Database, or IFDB. The IFDB doesn’t host games, but it’s where the majority of IF fans go to find new ones and leave reviews. In terms of a like-for-like combination of “storefront” and “repository” for IF such as itch provides, there really isn’t one, and consequently most of the games listed on the IFDB are hosted either on itch, or on the Archive.
Edit: looks as though @lurker and I cross-posted. Their post goes into much more detail than mine.
With some digging you can find some gems from the internet archive and many times you can play them on emulated hardware. I recently played a game that was a computer source code listing from an Analog magazine from the early 1980’s. It was called “Adventure in the 5th Dimension” and there is an emulated Atari to play it on the web. One of the boards regulars provided the solution to it
Your post does contain some crucial info I left out of mine! The IF Archive is terrible for discoverability on its own. Though I do think creating an IFDB page doesn’t necessarily lead to plays, and if you check the “new games” section on IFDB you’ll find most of those listings don’t have ratings or reviews. The best way to get your game played by this community is to enter a comp or jam. Ideally one of the big two comps: Spring Thing or the upcoming IFComp. Both also handle hosting for you, so you don’t have to worry about it. IFComp is competitive, though.
I’ve never thought about Internet Archive as a possibility, but this seems like a fun way to spend time. And yeah, if you back up all your games on Internet Archive, that adds another layer of security to prevent the info being lost in the future. Nothing really lasts forever, not even Steam. Probably.
There is an awesome collection of games on if archive. I like itch while my game is still in development, because I can keep it private, but see what it might look like on other systems (this is with Twine). I’m not sure the archive has those sorts of development settings, and they really don’t matter as much for parser games played through a standard interpreter.
I personally host my games on itch.io during development, then move them to the IF Archive a few months after release (when I’m pretty sure I won’t be making any more big changes). Itch does really annoying things when you try to play a game on mobile, while the Archive serves the HTML exactly as it was submitted with no changes.
I don’t know of any, but us writers also use itch for our books now (and our games of course~)
Thanks everyone. This has been an enlightening thread.
Neocities is currently blocked for me, and I’m assuming for most people in Australia. I was planning to make a site there, and it was accessible, then a week later it is suddenly blocked.
Wow, didn’t know that. An alarming change. I wonder if it stems from the social media ban, or possible anti-spam measures. (There’s a fair number of spam or malware-distributing sites on Neocities, which unfortunately means that Neocities sites get deprioritized by some search engines. It’s an issue with Bing currently.) Still, not great when your internet censorship goes that direction.
I looked online and it seems like several countries block Neocities. It’s hard to tell exactly which ones, but I know China and Australia are definitely on the list. When I have more time I’ll edit my post to include more info about censorship.
This is a good strategy. Thanks to the UK Online Safety Act, I can’t currently access most of the games on the IF Archive, even my own, but I’ve found that I can using the Wayback Machine.
I’ve also had a game rejected from the Archive because it contained an embedded font. The person handling the upload (I can’t remember who it was) argued that including an embedded font was tantamount to giving away proprietary software for free. I don’t know if this is official IFTF policy, but it’s put me off uploading anything there since.
Well, what license was the font used under? Do you have permission from the font creator to distribute the font? If the IF Archive hosts pirated fonts, the IFTF could be liable, so that sounds like a good policy to me… (Unless the font is free software, of course, but if so I assume you would have told them that and been allowed to upload it.)
To be fair, the terms of the licence do not permit embedded the font and distributing the resulting HTML file. It didn’t occur to me at the time.
End User License for Walden Fonts
It’s possible that embedding the file and hosting the HTML page myself also violates the licence since somebody could download the web page and extract the relevant code. But the alternative is to create images for each of the titles which creates its own problems.
Yeah, font licenses have gotten a bit awkward with the advent of the internet. It used to be that “you can distribute printed materials using this font, but not the font itself” was a reasonable and sensible rule, but nowadays most ways a font gets used require distributing the actual font files in some way—if you use it in a PDF, for example, either the font gets embedded into the PDF or viewers probably won’t see it.
It is. Without checking, I’m sure it is also the policy of Itch.IO and your own web hosting service. Fonts are code, so proprietary fonts are proprietary code.
Using a font in a PDF document may be an exception. (The Walden Fonts license you link you says “NOT APPLICABLE FOR APPLICATION/GAME EMBEDDING OR REDISTRIBUTION” but they might not consider PDF to be an application.) (As a tech nerd, I know that it is, but the person writing the license might not know that.) (Check this; I am not a lawyer.)
Open-source fonts are available in a wide array of tasty flavors! I always start a project by browsing https://fonts.google.com . The fonts there are all open-source (usually the SIL Open Font License). You can download any of them and then use them without linking back to Google or anywhere else.