Question 1

Do I need an account to play?

Accepted Answer

No. Every game on the site is playable without signing in. You click the play button and the game opens. An account only becomes useful when you want to upvote, comment, bookmark a game for later, or launch something of your own.

Question 2

Are the games free?

Accepted Answer

Almost all of them. Every listing carries a pricing label: Free means the whole game costs nothing, Free + paid extras means there is an optional purchase somewhere inside, and Paid means you will hit a wall. You can filter to free-only when browsing, and the label is set by the maker at submission. If it is wrong, the report button on the listing is the fastest way to fix it.

Question 3

Do these games work on a phone?

Accepted Answer

Some do, many do not, and we do not guess. Makers tag their own game as mobile-friendly, so filtering by mobile gives you the ones that claim to work on a touchscreen. Anything built around a keyboard (most platformers, most twitch shooters) will say browser rather than mobile. If a game is tagged mobile and is unplayable on your phone, report it and we will re-tag it.

Question 4

Where do the games actually run?

Accepted Answer

On the maker's own site. vibedgame does not host or rehost anyone's game; the play button takes you to the URL the maker submitted, on their domain or their itch.io page. That means their site's rules apply once you are there. We check every submitted link before it goes live and we remove listings whose links break, but the game itself is theirs.

Question 5

Will I lose my progress?

Accepted Answer

That depends entirely on the game. Most browser games save to your browser's local storage, which survives closing the tab but not clearing your site data or switching devices. A handful have real accounts. vibedgame stores nothing about your play sessions. We do not know what you played or how far you got, so we cannot restore it either.

Question 6

What does upvoting actually do?

Accepted Answer

It moves the game up the front page. Upvotes are the main input to the hot score, which is votes plus comments weighted at 0.34, divided by the age of the launch to the power of 1.5. One account is one vote per game, votes are not weighted by karma, and you can take a vote back by clicking again. The whole formula is written out on the about page.

Question 7

Why did a game I liked vanish from the front page?

Accepted Answer

Because the front page decays on purpose. A launch loses roughly sixteen times its ranking weight over its first day, which is what keeps the board turning over instead of showing you the same five games all month. Nothing was removed. Use the leaderboard for the best games of all time, the launch archive to see any past day exactly as it ranked, or bookmark a game to find it in your dashboard.

Question 8

How do I find a specific kind of game?

Accepted Answer

Three ways, all of them shareable URLs. Categories are the twelve big rooms: puzzle, action, horror and so on. Tags are finer: one mechanic, one mood, one piece of tech. Collections are hand-picked lineups with a note explaining why each game is on the list. Every filter lives in the address bar, so you can bookmark or send any view you build.

Question 9

Is there a way to get the good ones without visiting?

Accepted Answer

The daily email. One message, the games worth a lunch break, no product updates and no thread about our journey. It is the lowest-effort way to use the site and unsubscribing takes one click.

Question 10

What counts as a game I can submit?

Accepted Answer

Something interactive, finished enough to play end to end, that runs in a browser without an install. Prototypes and jam entries are welcome as long as they are playable. Small is fine, short is fine, ugly is fine. Toys and generative sandboxes usually qualify under Creative. What does not qualify: trailers, storefronts, waitlist pages, engine demos with no interaction, and anything where the browser link just points at a download.

Question 11

Does launching cost anything?

Accepted Answer

No. Submitting is free, there is no paid placement, and there is no way to buy a better position on the front page. If that ever changes, promoted listings will be labelled on the card itself.

Question 12

When does my game go live?

Accepted Answer

You pick the launch day during submission and the listing goes live at midnight UTC on that day. Every game that launches on the same UTC day competes in the same daily bucket, which is what the launch archive shows. You can schedule up to a couple of weeks out, which is worth doing if you want time to line up a post about it.

Question 13

Can I edit my listing after it launches?

Accepted Answer

Yes, from your dashboard, at any time. Title, tagline, description, screenshots, links and tags are all editable and edits go live immediately. The one thing you cannot change afterwards is the launch day, because moving a game between daily buckets would break the archive and let people re-run a launch that went badly.

Question 14

I shipped a big update. Can I launch again?

Accepted Answer

Once, and only for a genuinely different game. A new mode, a rebalance or a graphics pass is an update. Edit the existing listing and tell people in the comments. A rebuild that plays like a different game can be relaunched as a new listing, with a line in the description saying what it grew out of. Relisting the same game every quarter to farm a second front page is the one thing that turns a re-launch into a removal.

Question 15

Do I keep the rights to my game?

Accepted Answer

Completely. You own your game and everything you upload with it. Submitting grants vibedgame a narrow, non-exclusive licence to display the title, tagline, description and screenshots on the site and in the daily email, enough to run a listing and nothing more. It ends when the listing comes down. The exact wording is on the terms page.

Question 16

Do I have to say which AI tools I used?

Accepted Answer

It is optional and it is not a scarlet letter. The Built with field is a factual credit, the same as naming your engine, and it powers the tool hub pages that send traffic back to your game. It has zero effect on ranking. Most makers list two or three: an engine and whatever assistant they had open.

Question 17

How do I actually get votes?

Accepted Answer

Ship on a quiet day, write a tagline that says what you do rather than how you feel about it, lead with a screenshot of the actual game rather than a title card, and be in the comments for the first hour answering everyone. That first hour is most of it. A launch that gets ten real votes and four conversations in hour one usually finishes the day well, and one that gets nothing usually does not. The launch playbook goes through it properly.

Question 18

What happens if I get friends to upvote?

Accepted Answer

Sharing your launch is expected and good. Post it anywhere you like. What is not allowed is manufacturing votes: new accounts made to vote for you, vote-swap groups, incentives in exchange for a vote. That is detectable and the consequence is the votes get reversed, the game drops out of the day, and repeat cases lose the account. It is the one rule that hurts everyone else's launch, so it is the one we enforce hardest.

Question 19

Can I submit a game somebody else made?

Accepted Answer

No. Listings are by the maker, because the comment thread is where players ask how something was built and a middleman cannot answer that. If you found something great, the right move is to tell the maker to submit it, or suggest it for a collection.

Question 20

How do I take my game down?

Accepted Answer

Delete it from your dashboard and the listing and its comments go immediately. Search engines take a while to catch up, which is out of our hands. If you need it gone faster than that, email us and we will de-index it as fast as the crawlers allow.

Question 21

My submission was rejected. What now?

Accepted Answer

Reply to the moderation email. Every rejection names the specific rule and most of them are fixable in ten minutes: a dead link, a download disguised as a browser game, missing screenshots. Appeals are read by a person, usually the one who made the original call, and reversing a bad decision is not treated as embarrassing.

Questions, answered properly

For players

For makers

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Questions, answered properly

For players

For makers

Still stuck?