Submission rules

Most submissions go straight through. These rules exist for the handful that do not, and for the rarer case where a listing has to come down after it went live. They are written so that you can predict the outcome before you submit rather than after.

What counts as a game

Something interactive, playable from beginning to some kind of end, and running in a browser tab without an install. That is the whole test. It is deliberately loose at the edges.

Yes: jam entries, prototypes with one mechanic, idle games, text adventures, drawing toys, multiplayer party games, level editors, generative sandboxes, demakes of things you love, a physics experiment you got attached to. Short is fine. Ugly is fine. Single-file HTML is fine. Some of the best-performing games here are under 40KB.

No: trailers, store pages, waitlists, Discord invites, Kickstarter pages, engine demos with nothing to do, and anything whose browser link turns out to be a download button in disguise. If a visitor cannot do anything within five seconds of the page loading, it is not a listing yet.

It has to be yours

You submit games you worked on. Solo, a team, a client project you have permission to post. All fine. Submitting somebody else’s game is not, even with good intentions, because the comment thread is where players ask how a thing was built and a middleman cannot answer that.

Reskins and asset-flips are the grey area, so here is the line: the game has to be a thing you made, not a thing you renamed. Starting from a tutorial project, a template or an open-source base is completely normal. Say so in the description and credit it. Taking a finished game, changing the sprite sheet and the title, and calling it new is not. Same for a course project shipped essentially as taught.

Assets you did not make are fine as long as you have the right to use them. Credit them somewhere: in the game, in the description, in a comment. Nobody minds bought art. People do mind stolen art, and they will find it.

The link has to work

The play URL is the whole product. Before you submit, open it in a private window on a device that is not the one you built it on, and confirm all of this:

• It loads over HTTPS. Mixed-content warnings kill a launch dead.
• It does not 404 for someone with no cookies, no localStorage and no account on your site.
• It is not behind a login, an age gate you built yourself, an email capture, or a “join the Discord to play” wall.
• It goes to the game, not to a landing page with a play button on it. One click, not two.
• It stays up. A link that dies gets the listing unpublished automatically after we notice; fix it and it comes back with its votes intact.

An honest listing

The tagline, the description and the screenshots are a promise about what is behind the link. Break that promise and the vote you get is worth less than nothing, because the person who clicks through is now annoyed in your comment thread.

1. 1

   Screenshots show the actual game

   Real gameplay, captured from the real build. Concept art, a logo on a gradient, a mockup of a feature you have not built, or a frame from a different game are all out. If your game is ugly, post the ugly screenshot. People are far more forgiving of plain than of bait.

2. 2

   The tagline describes the game

   Under about ten words, and it should tell a stranger what they will be doing. “A roguelike where every death rewrites one rule” works. “An unforgettable journey awaits” does not, and it is not a rules violation, it just gets you fewer clicks.

3. 3

   The pricing label is accurate

   Free means the whole game is free. Free + paid extras means there is an optional purchase inside. Paid means somebody will hit a wall. Mislabelling a paywalled game as free is the fastest way to get a listing pulled and the slowest way to recover from it.

4. 4

   Tags describe, they do not fish

   Tag what your game actually is. Listing a single-player game under multiplayer to reach a busier hub is spam, and the hubs it pollutes are exactly the pages that would otherwise send you real players.

What is not allowed

A short list, and everything on it results in the listing coming down.

• Real-money gambling. No casinos, no slots, no loot boxes bought with currency you purchased, no crypto wagering, no skin betting. Poker, blackjack and roulette with fake chips and no purchase path are fine. The line is whether anyone can lose money.
• Sexual content. vibedgame does not host adult games. Nudity in a non-sexual context (a life drawing game, a body-horror piece) is a judgement call we will make and explain; a porn game is not a judgement call. Sexual content involving minors, real or drawn, results in a permanent ban and a report, with no appeal.
• Hate content. Games built to demean people for who they are. Not edgy humour, but the actual thing. We will not litigate the boundary in a comment thread.
• Malware and dark patterns. Cryptominers, forced redirects, fake system dialogs, popups that fight the back button, and anything that harvests data the game has no use for.
• Content you do not have the rights to. Fan games live at the rights holder’s discretion; if we get a valid DMCA notice the listing comes down while it is sorted out. See the terms for the counter-notice route.

Vote manipulation

This is the rule we enforce hardest, and it is worth explaining why. Faking votes does not just inflate one game. The front page is a fixed number of slots, so every manufactured vote pushes an honest launch down, usually someone who spent a month on a game and gets one day of attention for it.

Completely fine: posting your launch anywhere you like. Telling your followers, your Discord, your newsletter, your group chat, the subreddit for your genre. Asking people to play it. A launch that gets shared is working as intended, and the makers who do best here are the ones who show up with an audience.

Not fine:

• Creating accounts to vote for your own game.
• Vote rings: groups that agree to upvote each other’s launches on sight, whether or not anyone plays the games.
• Offering anything in exchange for a vote: keys, currency, a vote back, entry to a giveaway.
• Scripting votes, or paying anyone who offers to “boost” your launch.

The consequences escalate and we do not hide them. First time, the fraudulent votes are reversed and the game finishes the day where it honestly stood. If it is deliberate, the listing is unpublished and can be resubmitted for a future day. Repeat or coordinated cases lose the account and every listing on it. Accounts created purely to vote are removed with no notice.

In the comments

The comment thread under a launch is the best part of this site and it works because the bar is low and specific: criticise the game, not the person. “The jump feels floaty and I kept overshooting the third platform” is worth more to a maker than fifty upvotes. “This is garbage” is worth nothing to anyone and gets removed.

Makers: you are expected to be in your own thread on launch day, and you are allowed to disagree with feedback. What you are not allowed to do is follow someone around the site for leaving a bad review. Harass a player over a comment and the account goes, regardless of how good the game is.

Self-promotion in someone else’s thread is out. Post your own game instead. That is what the site is for.

Removal and appeals

Taking your own game down: delete it from your dashboard. The listing and its comments go immediately. Search engines take days to catch up, which we cannot speed up much, but email us if you need it de-indexed urgently and we will do what the crawlers allow.

Reporting a listing: every game page has a report button. It goes to a person, not a queue. Tell us which rule you think it hits and why. Reports that name a specific line get resolved in hours, reports that say “this is bad” get resolved eventually.

If we remove something of yours: you get an email that names the specific rule and quotes the part of your listing that hit it. Most removals are fixable in ten minutes: a dead link, a wrong platform label, a screenshot that is not from the game.

Appealing: reply to that email. A person reads it, usually the person who made the original call. We reverse decisions when we get them wrong and we do not treat that as embarrassing. The only category with no appeal is sexual content involving minors.

If none of the above fits your situation, hey@vibedgame.com reaches the same people.